Stephan Balkenhol
2009
The Berlin Wall Memorial Axel Springer Verlag
As part of the preparations for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009, Axel Springer Verlag decided to honoured the publisher Axel Springer and his decades-long commitment to the reunification of a divided Germany with a contemporary outdoor sculpture in front of the publishing house’s building in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
The artist Stephan Balkenhol, known worldwide for his wooden sculptures, created the bronze sculpture of the ‘Wall Runner’ on commission from the publishing house.
The sculpture incorporates historic L-shaped concrete elements from the Berlin Wall, which Axel Springer Verlag acquired in 2009 from the archives of the LuxPopArt Group.
Further segments of this provenance were handed over by the editorial board of the Bild newspaper in 2009 to the Minister-Presidents of selected Federal States for display in the state capitals of, amongst others, Bremen, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, as well as in Bonn, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Saarbrücken and Stuttgart.
