Sculptor Gabriela von Habsburg likes to exhibit in Eastern Europe.
“In Western Europe, everyone has a glass in their hand and are chatting..’I haven’t seen you since’… nobody’s looking at the art,” she said.
Eastern Europe
“When you go into the room in Eastern Europe, everyone has their backs to you because they are looking at the art,” she said at the private view of her Spatiu intre – in Between” solo exhibition of stainless-steel sculptures and lithographs in Bucharest.
Eastern Europe is a region the granddaughter of Charles I, the last Emperor of Austria is clearly drawn to. The Habsburg royal German family was one of the chief dynasties of Europe from the 15th to the 20th century. As dukes, archdukes, and emperors, the Habsburgs ruled Austria from 1282 until 1918, a realm that stretched to the principality of Transylvania.
„I am engaged in the Eastern countries. After the fall of the Iron Curtain (Ed’s note:in 1989), I wanted to visit all the countries I couldn’t visit before,” she told Universul.net.
Outdoor sculptures
Von Habsburg mainly works in stainless steel crafting works of art that range in size from small enough to perch on a shelf, to outdoor sculptures many meters high. Her dramatic and sometimes surprising outdoor sculptures (she has a giant coffee bean in Germany) can be found in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, the U.S., Britain and Kazakhstan among others.
Luxembourg-born von Habsburg divides her time between Bavaria where she has a studio and the Black Sea country of Georgia, where she’s an art teacher at the Visual Art and Design School in Tiblisi.
I asked her where she gets her inspiration from:”Most of my inspiration comes from working” she said.”I tell my students it’s 90 percent work and 10 percent genius inspiration.”
Why stainless steel sculptures? „I need three dimensions, to get the depth, to get everything out, I am lost on two dimensions.” She calls stainless steel „very precise…. there are no limits to it…. It is an ideal material.”
Shadow and light
„The sun is reflecting in it. You have the shadow and the light. When it’s outside and cloudy it’s milky gray, it is a fantastic material.”
She calls Romania a „beautiful and fascinating” and politically „important” country and this is her third exhibition here– the previous ones were in Cisnidoara, near Sibiu, and Cluj.
When you have a name as famous as von Habsburg, it opens doors. Yet despite or maybe because of her impeccable pedigree, she seems more focused on meeting people and knocking down old barriers and borders.
„I didn’t want to go (to Eastern European countries) as a tourist…I wanted to be invited somewhere where I could make an exhibition… so you learn about the place through the eyes of an artist, a museum curator or a gallery director.”
Georgia
Doing precisely that, she created an outdoor sculpture called the Rose Memorial (the national flower of Georgia) in 2007 to mark the Rose Revolution. Her life then took an unexpected turn.
In 2003, Mikheil Saakashvili had come to power during the Rose Revolution, after storming Parliament with demonstrators to protest elections fraudulently won by President Eduard Shevardnadze. He was Georgia’s new hope of democracy.
Georgia is strategically important and although a relatively poor country, has a wealth of rock. Von Habsburg asked communities from different regions to bring hunks of different colored stone that was laid out over an 18-meter space to suggest a rose.
Citizenship
Just before the unveiling, paths were cleared and roads repaired and von Habsburg realized Saakashvili would be coming to the official opening. But that wasn’t the only surprise _ the president offered her citizenship in honor of the work she’d done for Georgia. She was then appointed Georgia’s ambassador to Germany from 2009 to 2013.
„Every country in the world has an embassy in Berlin,” she says talking about her time as a former ambassador. She moved Georgia’s embassy and the residence into the center of the city and opened its doors to officials, personalities and diplomats, inviting them to art exhibitions among other things.
More than a dozen art lovers and friends attended the private view on Wednesday held in an apartment in the 1930s Art Deco Wilson building (one of the world’s first skyscrapers), which was home to the talented late Romanian artist Oana Ionel, who died tragically in 2023 in a car crash.
Crossroads
People chatted and drank Georgian red and Romanian white wine. Von Habsburg talked passionately about her art. New connections were made, old ones revived. Guests looked and touched the smooth, cool stainless steel sculptures dotted around the gallery.
Maybe Romania is the crossroads where East meets West.
