Hannsjörg Voth

* 1940 in Bad Harzburg, Germany;
lives in Munich, Germany

Hannsjörg Voth is one of the pioneers of conceptual art and land art in Germany. After training as a commercial artist, he began his artistic work with screen printing and painting. In the mid-1970s, he produced his first landscape-based projects, which discussed myths, archaism and decay. Since the early 1980s, his major projects have been created in the Moroccan desert, consisting of the “Stairway to Heaven“, in which one can climb 52 steps into the sky and the “Golden Spiral“, a fountain sculpture constructed from quarter circles, through which one can walk, as well as the “City of Orion“, a large sculpture whose seven towers replicate the constellation of Orion on earth. Most of Voth’s works are conceived in such a way that sooner or later they fall prey to impermanence; for the most part, only the documentation of the work remains.

“In the desert, there’s an infinity where you just don’t have any distraction. I’m certainly working there but the time is off. That’s actually the beauty, you get very, very old there, because time no longer exists.” (Hannsjörg Voth, BR)