24 sculptures at 22 locations between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. BLICKWEIT – Sculptures for the North is the name of the project by steel sculptor Robert Schad, which has been re-surveying Schleswig-Holstein since autumn 2024.
For Robert Schad, born in 1953, Schleswig-Holstein long remained a blank spot. Raised in Ravensburg in Upper Swabia, he studied in Karlsruhe, moved to Porto on a DAAD scholarship, and initially focused his artistic attention on the Iberian Peninsula. “First exhibitions, further scholarships and public projects […] ultimately opened [his] horizon to the north,” the catalogue says.
Exhibitions in Wilhelmshaven and Bremen, art-in-architecture projects, and finally in 2003 the large-scale sculpture ESCRIT for the Syltquelle art space: step by step, Schad works his way up the coasts. The decisive impetus for BLICKWEIT comes in 2019 with the presentation of his works at the Richard Haizmann Museum in Niebüll—encounters with “water, mudflats and waves” become the starting point for the idea of “planning a sculpture project for the north of Germany”.
Uwe Haupenthal, then head of the Nordfriesland museum network, describes Schleswig-Holstein in the catalogue as a land of dikes, sandy beaches and islands, “flat in the west”, “idiosyncratically austere, with a high sky”, and in the east shaped by terminal moraine hills and steeply sloping coasts. At the same time, “numerous wind turbines, enabling economic change and a much-discussed energy transition”, have altered the character of the landscape. For Schad and his sculptures, this mix is both a challenge and an invitation..
