Ottmar
Hörl.

About the Artist

Seven thousand hares. One relentless idea.

Ottmar Hörl works in scale. Not scale as in large — though his installations are often enormous — but scale as in repetition, accumulation, the meaning that shifts when a single object becomes a thousand identical objects arranged in a public square. He is best known for placing 7,000 replicas of Albrecht Dürer’s famous hare across the Nuremberg market square, and for a series of garden gnome sculptures that drew official government condemnation in Germany for their irreverence and political edge. The gnomes are silly. That is precisely the point.

Born in Nauheim, Germany in 1950, Hörl studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and later at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Klaus Rinke. He co-founded the Formalhaut artist group in 1985. Since 1999 he has served as a professor — and since 2005 as President — of the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. His work appears in public installations throughout Europe and in major institutional collections.

In 2010, Hörl participated in the Ekphrasis exhibition at Lift Trucks — a show in which writers created written responses to visual artworks. His lime-green gnome sculptures dominated the building’s main space. He shared it with A.R. Penck, FA-Q, and works by Saul Steinberg and Robert Motherwell. Benjamin Genocchio reviewed it for the New York Times. Over 400 people attended. Frank Serpico was in the crowd.

“Garden gnomes are silly and they do silly things.”

Ottmar Hörl