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Large-scale sculptural installation featuring 800 black frogs made of plastic and 5 steel balls to mark the centenary of the Mathildenhöhe artists' colony in Darmstadt
What inspires Ottmar Hörl is not only the fairytale character of the locality on Mathildenhöhe. He also draws on the name of the museum hill. The Mathildenhöhe hill is named after Mathilde, a Bavarian princess and daughter of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. The "Frog Prince – Waiting for the Princess" installation alludes to this historical background. Enchanting, playful and yet rigid, amusing and not without irony, 800 black, matt-glossy plastic frogs sit with filigree grace in the Albin Müller basin. They neither turn their heads to the Russian Chapel nor up the hill towards the exhibition building, but sideways in the direction of five large black balls that have been set up on the adjacent lawn. Ottmar Hörl adapts and alienates the frog prince tale by the Brothers Grimm. The frog and the ball have been serially multiplied.[1]
I was trying to present the frog prince parable in a new way: by using 800 frogs and, to correspond with them, several large iron balls — a reference to the princess's golden ball. One can only wonder at this woman's bodybuilding skills playing with these balls ... This gripping topic has moved me since my childhood. The princess is rewarded for having promised a frog everything, and kills him nonetheless. "Bitterly angry" and "with all her might", she throws the frog against the wall when he tries to get into her bed — the reward he was promised for rescuing her golden ball from the water. Even the king is taken aback by his daughter's actions and tells her: "What you have promised, you must keep." A highly ambiguous story ...[2]
[1] Nadja von Tilinsky, Interventionen. Kunst-Kommentare zur Mathildenhöhe, in: Centenarium. Einhundert Jahre Künstlerkolonie Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, Darmstadt 2003, p. 48
[2] Ottmar Hörl, in: An Address to Humanity, 2010, p. 176
