Art - 1 May 2022

HA Schult's Wall of Freedom in the words of Drew Hammond

HA Schult’s Wall of Freedom is on permanent view at AQ 7, a division of the Andreas Quartier at the junction of Neubrückstrasse and Ratingerstrasse

HA Schult 's Wall of Freedom in Düsseldorf

©Ansgar van Treeck

HA Schult’s Wall of Freedom

"The implicit assertion that it is by means of culture that we define our humanity underlies HA Schult’s Wall of Freedom, newly installed in Düsseldorf’s Altstadt. At the outset, this work transforms a paradigmatic structure of division and conflict into one of fellowship and peace through art.

The artist achieves this not merely through depiction—the wall also reveals images that bear witness to the history of Düsseldorf as a laboratory par excellence of art experiments since its devastation in the war—but also by investing it some with features that contravene the conventional function of a wall, and still others that implicitly allow it to take flight.

This latter condition has everything to do with its evocations of the spirit of those who made Düsseldorf a crossroads of new art production for decades, e.g. the poet, Heine; the artists Beuys, Uecker, Piene; and even their friend, the art patron and writer, Gabriele Henkel; together with many others known to Düsseldorf and the world. Schult’s work reminds us that the spirits of these figures continue to infuse art history and the world at large, in a way that transcends their own lifetimes in art. Here, this metaphysical condition resides in aesthetic tension with the conventional functional criteria of marginalization that walls ordinarily define.

HA Schult, an artist who came of age in the heyday of Adorno’s implicit appeal for artists to free themselves from the bounds of traditional exhibition venues, has long concerned his work with an acute consciousness of place. Like many of his actions and interventions in a neo-heroic style, the Wall of Freedom generates a tension with its own site-specificity because, traditionally the site-specific work by definition was bound to its place, even if it would have the ambition to subsume its situation. HA Schult’s work would contravene this limitation not only by means of its structural attributes—it folds and slides like a screen that can appear and disappear to reveal the transparent glass façade of a building—but also because, like the artist’s Trash People exhibited the world over, his figures universalize sites that otherwise would remain perpetually fixed place markers of the individual nations where they are to be found.

In Düsseldorf, amid the echoes of the voices of the city’s cultural exemplars, the artist has rendered infinitely mobile a wall anchored to its place. There is no shortage of need for public works of art that stand contra the resurgence of barbarism in contemporary discourse, one that technology seems at a loss to assuage."

—Drew Hammond

HA Schult 's Wall of Freedom in Düsseldorf  at night

©Ansgar van Treeck

The Freedom Wall by HA Schult was unveiled in November 2017. It is located on the "Spaces" building of the Andreas Quartier by Frankonia Eurobau.

We are in the historic core of Düsseldorf. At the time, the artist was very moved to create a work of art at this historic location, "Freedom is the good we have to fight for. The Wall of Freedom is Düsseldorf's answer to the attack on our inner freedom." HA Schult had called on thousands of citizens of the city to name their idea of freedom - with their wishes and hopes they inspired HA Schult to create this great work of art.

Read more news from HA Schult below.

The author of the text Drew Hammond sadly passed away on 23 April 2022. Here is a tribute to the Hope art installation by HA Schult

 in Cologne directly on the Rhine.

©HA Schult

Drew Hammond

Born in London in 1957 Hammond studied Philosophy of Aesthetics under José-María Sánchez de Muniain at the University of Madrid (1975–1976), and Chinese Aesthetics and Neo-Confucian Thought under Wing-tsit Chan of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, where he entered the PhD. program (1976–1982). During the eighties and nineties, as a successive resident of five countries in Latin America, he wrote art criticism for El Diario de Caracas and other publications under the pseudonym, M.T. Han.

In 2006, he was appointed a Visiting Lecturer in Contemporary Art for Global Architecture History and Theory program of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Landscape, Architecture and Design. And in the following year, he directed a graduate seminar in Beijing, in the Theory of Perspective in Classical Chinese Art for the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Also in 2007, he was appointed to lecture in the Chinese language on Contemporary Western Art 1962–2005 at the Graduate Faculty of the China Art Academy in Beijing, and continues to lecture annually on contemporary art for the Executive Masters Program in Art Market Studies (EMAMS) of the University of Zürich.

As former Senior International Correspondent for The Art Economist, Hammond specialized in presentation strategy in contemporary art. Now a resident of Berlin, he serves as a curatorial consultant to Heldart, a non-profit art organization that makes site- specific contemporary exhibitions. Most recently, he has lectured at the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle (Berlin) on Seeing as Process: Veronika Kellndorfer and Steve Rowell, (a cooperation with the Senate Chancellery Berlin as part of the City Partnership Berlin—Los Angeles). He has also lectured for the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin, The Chinese academy of Art in Beijing, and for The University of Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. Besides having published numerous exhibition catalogues and essays in books on artists’ works, he also has published in Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, Art investor, The Art Newspaper ( China). and other periodicals dedicated to art topics. 

Concomitantly with his art activities, Hammond has also published essays on Kubrick and Tarkovsky, and worked in a variety of capacities in the film industry, serving as script and editorial consultant to several motion picture production companies including Donald Cammell’s Perpetual Motion Pictures (Perpetual Mopic) Ltd. (London); P.E.A. Films, Inc. 

Drew Hammond died in Berlin on April 23 2022