“I tinkered my way through my whole youth”: Ulrich Panick from Wolfratshausen is a sculptor. He talks to our newspaper about his work.
Wolfratshausen - “My artistic approach is shaped by my experiences as a stonemason. It takes time and what's gone is gone, ”says Wolfratshausen sculptor Ulrich Panick. Panick is a reserved person who, as the saying goes, likes to work in the "quiet little room".
His workshop is located in the former backyard of the School of Fantasy. Panicks became known as a public artist. He was successful in teamwork with the architect Martina Günther and the sculptor Nausikaa Hacker. Over the years, the trio carried out major projects in Munich, Augsburg and Freising under the name "open systems", later GHP, and won prizes.
The 63-year-old is a concept artist. Somehow an idea is already in the foreground for him, but the aesthetic appearance is certainly reflected. Today he has to smile at how he once irritated his professors at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. "For the 1989 annual exhibition, I cleaned the windows of the Kornbrust class," recalls Panick. “Unfortunately, my professor didn't understand it at first.” Layer after layer, the young student carried the dirt of the decades from the historical windows of the academy, although traces, in his opinion, must have come from the war. "After that, the outward view was sharpened and a crystalline light opened up inward."
“I tinkered my way through my entire youth,” remembers the Graefelfinger native, who has lived with his family in Wolfratshausen since 1994 and, in addition to his art projects, runs a “repair workshop” for the “Citizens for Citizens” association. Panick followed in his father's footsteps and began studying mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Munich after graduating from high school. After the second semester, however, it was clear to him: “It won't work.” Panick learned to be a stonemason. During his apprenticeship, he received restoration orders for the neo-Gothic Munich City Hall. He then learned how to work granite and gneiss in Ticino.
Back in Bavaria, he founded an artist's flat-sharing community in Thankirchen near Dietramszell in 1981. There he met his current wife, the ceramicist Tina Pause. Daughter Rosa was born in 1984 and son Max two years later. Even during his studies, he had to struggle between artistic freedom and the demands of everyday life. Due to "fortunate circumstances", as he says, he ended up in 1996 at the Technical University of Munich at the Chair for Artistic Design, Faculty of Architecture.
Ulrich Panick is still a creative mind. He is currently working with newspaper photos and turning them into murals that are packed in inserts like a series of books - always at hand for redesigning the room. "Let things happen and see what happens", that is Panick's intention. web