Kloster Schoenthal Sculpture Park
A few days before the Tree Museum, I went to Kloster Schoenthal in Langenbruck, Switzerland, another fantastic sculpture park. It’s a couple hours from Basel by bicycle in the foothills of the Jura Alps at a monastery that dates back to 1145. The land is part of a private farm, and the home of a collection of sculpture and land art. I didn’t love any particular sculpture, but I liked most of them, and I loved the setting. It’s a lot of fun to wander around and see the different sculptures and the church building and the landscape. Switzerland has an amazing combination of rustic charm and sophistication, and Langenbruck is one of the best places to see that.
The highlight of the sculptures for me is probably these charred-wood totems by David Nash.
The sculpture park does temporary exhibitions. While I was there, they were showing drawings and sculptures by Peter Randall-Page. He makes seedlike forms out of stone.
The building is one of the oldest churches in Switzerland.
This one with stone on top of wood is by Ilan Averbuch. Apparently it represents waves, but I think the stone looks like birds. He has a couple of sculptures at Runnymede.
Like any great land art site, the sculptures make it feel like everything in the landscape is sculptural.
I’m not sure it comes through in the photo but in person the topo lines worn onto this hillside feel like a artwork by the artist known as Cows.
And then it turned out that this piece is an artwork. I thought it had a nice sculptural effect and then it turned out to indeed be a sculpture by Nash.
This entry was posted on Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 at 8:08 am and is filed under sculpture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
