Main artist

Florian Tschurtschenthaler | *2001 in Innichen, lives in Sexten/Moos 

“Grounded” – that is the word with which Florian Tschurtschenthaler describes himself. Craftsmanship runs in the family: his great-grandfather, grandfather and father all carved. He knew early on that this, too, was his path, and after compulsory schooling he attended Provincial Vocational School for Artistic Craftsmanship in Val Gardena / Gröden, South Tyrol. He then completed a specialisation as a wood sculptor at the same school. When he sees a piece of wood, he first has a sense of what could come of it – then comes the technique. His figures are expressive and rich in detail; their range extends from sacred motifs to people of everyday life, with particular care for the faces. Since 2021 he has been self-employed, by his own account in an artistic phase of searching: in search of his style and of himself. When he is not carving, he works in the forest. The wood he later works with comes from there. Sometimes he even sleeps on the forest floor, beside the figure he is currently working on. It is there that he comes to himself. 

“Christmas”
What began with the idea of the Christmas Truce – that unofficial ceasefire between soldiers at Christmas 1914 – became for Florian Tschurtschenthaler a reckoning with the present. He has carved three wooden figures: two soldiers facing each other in no man's land, and a sniper who pauses up on Capuchin Hill. The figures stand far apart; through telescopes, visitors draw the figure opposite them closer – exactly the kind of zooming in that the work is about. Christmas tells of the moment when the enemy becomes a human being again: the two soldiers suddenly look each other in the eye and recognise skin, a racing pulse, the same doubts, a human life. The sniper, too, grasps what kind of machine the war has made of him; his head buries itself in his helmet. Florian is interested in how dehumanisation works: the enemy must first be turned into a threat before one can shoot at him – a mechanism that has long since ceased to operate only in war, but everywhere that a human being is reduced to performance and surface.

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