Great 1200th Birthday Gift

Created: 07/09/2022, 18:43

By: Sandra Sedlmaier

Huge response: the exhibition in the Villa de Osa in Kempfenhausen had more than 1500 visitors.

The photo was taken at the vernissage.

© Jörn Kachelriess

1500 visitors, maybe more, over three weekends: the exhibition "From A to Z" in the Kempfenhauser Villa de Osa was a success.

Kempfenhausen

- The organizers are overwhelmed by the encouragement they have received, and the opening of the listed villa offered many Bergern and district residents the opportunity to say goodbye to a building that was open to the public for decades and will soon be sold.

What a birthday gift: contemplate unique works of art and enjoy the view in a listed villa of exceptional beauty.

The opening of the Villa de Osa in Kempfenhausen and the exhibition "From A to Z" brought joy to many mountain residents and people from abroad.

Of course also the organizers, Berg's culture officer Dr.

Andreas Ammer, third mayor Elke Link, art historian Katja Sebald and Jörn Kachelrieß, even if it was a lot of work.

But everything worked out, even the weather cooperated.

"We told people a lot about the villa and the artists, but we also learned so much from the visitors," says Ammer.

On the phone you can hear Ammer smiling when he talks about the many special moments that are related to the “From A to Z” project in the Villa de Osa.

The surprise when owner Dieter Schön agreed to open the villa.

"It was my idea to do something in the villa," says Ammer.

"Exhibiting Achternbusch and Zimmer was Katja Sebald's idea." Zimmer was immediately enthusiastic, but collecting the Achternbusch pictures together proved to be difficult.

The family didn't want to lend anything, so the four organizers, through the Circle of Friends of the Achternbusch, asked who had art from the Achternbusch and collected pictures from all over Bavaria.

"It was real detective work," says Ammer.

"But that's how an exhibition of passions came about - each of the around 35 pictures hangs in a private household, much loved." For three weeks, the Ammer/Link couple also had a blank spot on the wall where Achternbusch's elephant usually resides.

This is how a unique Achternbusch show was created, which will probably never exist in this form again.

The room paintings were brought professionally in a 7.5-ton truck.

"At first I thought they never all have enough space," Ammer recalls.

"But the villa swallowed everything."

The sculptures by the late artist Gerd Jäger, which appear massive in the garden of his house in Farchach, found plenty of space on the terrace and in the passageway to the new building.

And the round attic room, the former chapel, was made for the Lüßbach work of art by the late Berger artist Hannelore Jüterbock from 1986 - another gift to the Berger: that they could see it again in the year of the 1200th birthday of their village.

The visitors came from very different areas.

Ammer is happy to have inspired the Berger, who otherwise do not appear in public.

Former doctors from the Schön Clinic, which was last in the villa, came.

"A woman wanted to see the room in which her father died again," says the culture officer.

In general, many Bergers wanted to say goodbye to the villa - and somehow vice versa: "The villa spread an incredibly beautiful atmosphere, as if it wanted to say goodbye itself," Ammer noted.

And then there was what Ammer calls "the beautiful volte of history".

The round room on the ground floor on the far right, the former clinic cafeteria, has been decorated with art from the Achternbusch.

As one visitor said, this was the "Strauß room", i.e. the sick room in which the former CSU leader and Bavarian Prime Minister Franz Josef Strauss usually lay.

Strauss and Achternbusch were known to be pet enemies.

Now the doors of the Villa de Osa are closed again.

Their future looks like this: the attached clinic building will be demolished, and five two- and three-storey houses with high-priced apartments will be built in their place.

Everything is to be sold.

The Schön Clinic was on the site until 2016; before that, the hospital belonged to Strauss' personal physician, Dr.

Valentin Argirov.