The living museum of Hermann Hechenberger from Paunzhausen

Created: 02/26/2022, 19:00

By: Andreas Beschorner

His “baby”: Hechenberger always had this sculpture with him during his trip to New York.

© Beschorner

He has a golf tractor, a baby made of scrap metal that he has traveled with, and hundreds of other such objects: Hermann Hechenberger from Paunzhausen.

Paunzhausen

– When he visited New York for his 60th birthday, Hermann Hechenberger not only had his wife with him.

His “baby”, as he says, was always there too.

His "babe"?

A figure made of scrap metal reminiscent of an owl, which Hechenberger missed a Bayern flag and which he didn't put down as a kind of provocation.

If something is typical of the 63-year-old from Paunzhausen, then that. Because his very idiosyncratic art objects, which he assembles from scrap metal and other materials, are intended to provoke.

Hundreds of such objects are piled up in his house, in front of the house and around the house.

Hermann Hechenberger worked for Audi in Ingolstadt for 43 years.

But there is no Audi at the entrance to his house in Paunzhausen.

No: A true monster made of iron, a "tractor golf", welcomes the visitor - golf in the front, huge bulldog tires in the back.

It has even been seen at an exhibition, reports Hechenberger, who answers the question of where he got all the scrap metal and materials: “From the flea market.

Others have the money in their accounts.”

One who does not need large consumption

Hechenberger, on the other hand, is someone who doesn't need big consumption.

It is more important to him that the old objects are not thrown away, but rather “remain alive” by being processed into a work of art.

It is also important to the man in whose house you look in vain for a television that he can express his opinion with his art.

So art as a “valve” when something particularly annoys him.

Or when it comes to war, which Hechenberger repeatedly addresses in his works – sometimes very drastically.

In his eyes, war, he says, is nothing other than murder.

(By the way: everything from the region is now also available in our regular Freising newsletter.)

A hodgepodge: The works of art that have been created over the past decades are stacked in almost every room in his house in Paunzhausen.

© Beschorner

It is a long, long and multifaceted path that the artist Hechenberger has traveled to this day, and it is documented in countless objects from the packed attic to the stairs to almost every room in his apartment, the garage and the garden: inconspicuous There is a milk churn in a shed – painted blue and, as Hechenberger says, the beginning of his artistic career.

That was in 1985. "I'm not green, but I'm ecologically minded," says Hechenberger of himself.

"Tractor golf": At the entrance to his property in Paunzhausen, this object welcomes the visitor - "no disorder", as a sign says, "just ideas".

© Beschorner

His life and his art were shaped by the fact that he spent several times in India and Nepal, each time for a longer period of time, where he got to know and appreciate Buddhism.

That gave him a new attitude towards life: “What do I really need?” He gives an answer himself: his house, his garden – what he calls a “living museum”.

Because as a sign at the entrance to Hechenberger's property announces: "I have no disorder, there are only ideas lying around."

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