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Restoring the sculptures

Part of the process to prepare to celebrate Werner’s work and contribution to Auroville and to beauty in general was the restoration of all of his sculptures and the wall where they are being exhibited.

This took quite a lot of layers and Werner’s trusted assistant Muthu has diligently executed this work with dedication.

At the beginning of the arts stands architecture, which a human needs to be settled, a housing space. Thus the art of building is bound even in its highest forms to its goal: to be housing. 

Thus we can call all that architecture creates, a space that defines the human art to live. Indeed the human creates this living space by himself but the space exerts an formative influence on the human.

In him either the inner sensitivity can unfold or it can perish; here aesthetic feeling can be concretely experienced. Thus the equilibrium point in architecture is perceptible through a spatial body feeling in which all senses are participating. For the creator Werner Stoff this habitat is the supporting base for the human who is interested in intellectual values above and beyond his functioning in society. Stoff is convinced  that only in the correct habitat a happy self-development of humans is possible, that only in the ‘right’ surroundings the healing of the harmonic beauty can come to fruition.

The ideal space is reached when the space is perceived either as an extension of the I or as a rampart against the ugly outside world.

With such a claim on architecture our architectural landscape seems more ugly: our spaces are tuned for effectiveness; everything is planned and created from their function. Most of what is built today stays in the form, shows no soul.

Countering this general trend is the concern of Werner Stoff, who, from an inner view and not from the external perception, follows his artistic force, which creates not from the intellectual but from the internalization.

Stoff is convinced that architecture has a function for a fulfilled life, and that the rules of beauty that become visible in architecture, empower us. So is his creation meant as corrective, to save the lost nature in the human daily reality.

A correctly understood architecture can help, again with awe that works deeply in us and a sublime order to uncover us.

Werner Stoff has felt that this is possible most closely by symbols and symbolism. Despite its abstractness and unreachability the symbol may not lose its relation to the here and now, because ideal ideas block the view on reality.

It would be therefore useless to formally renew symbols by spiritually emptying them.

Only the abstract content makes abstract art. This abstract content Kandinsky called “inner sound”, which is understood as the creative force in the human soul power. The creative is the spiritual, and from the spiritual the abstract artist primarily creates the content of his art works and only secondarily does he utilise the natural means of expression in the shaping of the content.

Abstract art, because it proclaims no material world but the inner view, designs the sound of the spiritual world.

Stoffs creation is definable from avant-garde tendencies by his representation of concentrated intensity of experience, which doesn’t primarily orient itself on formal criteria, but on the traceable identity of artistic intention and artistic expression.

The symbol sculptures want to be used, want to lead us away from exclusively human work oriented thinking and feeling, they want to steer our gaze at the  superordinate powers that surround us and herewith carry the Divine back into our lives.

By the totality of his work Werner Stoff wants to awaken real values and make them traceable.

Dr. Klaus Borchers

A guide through the exhibition

The human, who is spiritually attached to the 19th century, has trouble with modern art. The (Freemason) Loge of MonchenGladbach exhibits works by the artist Werner Stoff, architect, designer and sculptor both to open the discussion on the total concept of physical art, and to make a contribution to a better understanding of abstract art in our times.

What is abstract art tell us clearly the artists who were the initiators of abstract art in our century such as B. Marc and Kandinsky in their book “The blue rider” (Munchen 1912).
Their writing clearly states that not the form, whether the real or the abstract, makes the being of abstract art. That our generally difficult access to abstract art is surely caused by…

… that not the form but the abstract content forms the core of the art work, indifferent if the form is real or abstract.

We therefore cannot determine a shape as abstract art because it has an abstracted form, but only the abstracted content makes the abstract art.
Kandinsky describes this abstract content as the “inner sound”, which is moved by the soul and the spiritual.
From the spiritual the artist creates primarily the content of his abstract art, and only secundarily does he use the natural materials of expression in the forming of the content.
We call this art abstract because it renounces annunciation of the material world and because this art…

…and because this art designs the inner view, the sound of the spiritual world.

It is thus an error to hold art works for abstract art only because they were formed by abstraction, without this form expressing an abstract content. Such works are merely formal expressions, empty and spiritless: void; the abstractly formed artwork is however non-objective towards the spiritual content.

Abstract art of spiritual statement is never void, but non-objective just like music or architecture is non-objective but never void.

It is an error to think that abstract art arises by ‘abstraction’ from the natural form. The form of each art work arises by abstracting the natural form, hereby to penetrate the abstract content is impossible though…

…hereby to penetrate the abstract content is impossible though.

An art work that does not originate from abstract content, despite the abstraction of the form becomes only an empty abstraction of the form.
Abstract art also is something fundamentally different than an abstraction from the natural phenomenon; he who creates from the abstract content follows the way from inside to outside, not from outside to inside.

The participation in the content of the spiritual world, which is proclaimed by abstract art, is called “appearing in an other place” by Franz Marc.

Herewith is denoted the other, the non-material, spiritual world.
Here the soul emerges as it were, is lifted to the source of creation.
Sculptures

Here you find a link between the 3rd principle of Sri Aurobindo “from the near to the far”