Art Studio Elbe - Verband freischaffender Künstler.

Author - Brian Hawkeswood. Baroque Foundations in Stone Pirna’s historic core still bears the imprint of Baroque artistry—not just in its buildings, but in its sculptural details. In the former fortress Festung Sonnenstein, the Skulpturensommer exhibition places historic reliefs and busts—like those by Johann Kretzschmar, a student of the Baroque master Balthasar Permoser—directly alongside modern sculptures  . For example, a tambourin player and a granite “König David” (2010) frame visitors’ entrance, echoing centuries-old craftsmanship  . A Seasonal Symphony Since 2013, curator Christiane Stoebe has organized an annual sculpture summer high above Pirna, pairing modern works with medieval bastion architecture  . In 2025, the theme “Resonanz” unites 27 German and Czech artists, including Jan Hendrych and Waldemar Grzimek  . Displayed are works such as Livia Kubach & Michael Kropp’s Paarstein (2018, sandstone) and Grzimek’s thoughtful bronze Sitzender Alter (19...

  Author - Brian Hawkeswood.                      Nach unten scrollen für die deutsche Übersetzung. It was on a late summer afternoon, under a drowsy sky threaded with swaying poplars, that I found myself once more walking the grooved and noble stones of Pirna’s old town—stones that seemed to whisper the faded footsteps of time. The hour had turned languid, and the air wore the perfume of lime blossoms and sun-warmed sandstone. But it was not the view of the Elbe, nor the steep red roofs climbing the hillside like scattered playing cards, that arrested me. It was something smaller—nearly hidden, and yet singular: a child-sized bronze figure resting near the city’s ramparts, that border of stone which still defines the edges of the old quarter like the hem of a forgotten coat. There, near Grohmannstraße, where the promenade brushes the ancient wall like a lover’s hand returning after absence, I saw him: a little faun, frozen in...

 Author- Brian Hawkeswood.                                Nach unten scrollen für die deutsche Übersetzung. Each morning, on my walks, I would come across her—a bronze figure in a small park near the Elbe. No plaque, no inscription, and yet she possessed an unexpected presence. She stands balanced on the back of a great fish, as though surrendering to its silvery current, and in her hand she holds a cluster—of flowers, perhaps, or fruit—a quiet offering to time, to the river, to the town itself. I do not know who made her, or when. No documents seem to record her as official art, and yet she is art, patinated by rust, marked by the weather—made freer, perhaps, because of it. She gives the impression of having stood there since the first fish swam through the Elbe: timeless, unusual, almost speaking. And she speaks only through grace. She is the spirit of the river—not mythological in the grand sense, ...

  Author - Brian Hawkeswood.                              Nach unten scrollen für die deutsche Übersetzung. “The body is a canvas,” they say, as if it were a blank wall in a forgotten street in Berlin, awaiting the first stroke of a spray can, some fleeting rebellion soon covered over by the next, until all one sees is palimpsest. But skin is not wall. Skin breathes, bruises, ages. It carries the living history of a person, involuntarily and in silence. To mark it permanently—willingly—is to commit an act of astonishing intimacy and irreversibility. I have often found myself, in trams and summer beer gardens, distracted by a forearm, a calf, a neck, where ink coils and stutters like a badly remembered story. The tattooed flesh of Germans—so many and so willingly etched—seems to me at times an attempt to attach permanence to a self grown otherwise transient. And yet, how strange that the chosen motifs are rar...