Johann Belz: Klapperbrunnen

The sculptor Johann Belz, who was born in Krasnik Łobeski in 1925 and lived and worked in Chemnitz until his death in 1976, modelled his "Klapperbrunnen" fountain at the Chemnitz bus station on a cascade of lady's mantle leaves and flowers. A branched tubular architecture grows out of a shallow, square concrete basin, supplying small fountains with water. They produce arched jets of water that spring from stylised flower shapes and fill recessed, leaf-shaped and movable bowls. Some of them tilt and empty themselves with a rhythmically varying clatter, giving this impressive work of concrete art its name.

Belz came to Klingenthal in 1945 as the only survivor of his family, initially carving for a living as a craftsman and later working as an advertising designer for SDAG Wismut. According to Belz in a testimonial, the Wismut miners encouraged him to study art at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts under Walter Arnold. After graduating, Belz worked as a freelance sculptor and taught at the technical college for applied arts in Schneeberg. The influence of his Dresden teacher characterised Belz's work, which was modelled on nature, until the mid-1960s. An exhibition of fountain works by the Berlin sculptor and blacksmith Fritz Kühn led to an artistic and aesthetic turnaround in Belz's work. In apparent contradiction to his earlier sculptures, he now created welded compositions made of pipes, rolled and hammered sheet metal alongside his figurative works, and introduced a new type of abstract-constructive art into the urban space characterised by socialist architectural concepts.

In addition to the Klapperbrunnen fountain, he created an abstract flower star and a wall design in the cafeteria of Chemnitz University of Technology. Work on his last work, the relief "Kampf und Sieg der revolutionären deutschen Arbeiterklasse" (1970-1976), which was commissioned by the state, intensified an already existing crisis in the artist's life. The monumental work remained unfinished due to his suicide in 1976, but can be seen on a façade on Brückenstraße / Bahnhofstraße.

(Text: Alexander Ochs / Ulrike Pennewitz )