Horsch Maschinen GmbH, together with Upper Palatinate sculptor Vasyl Plotnikov, has completed a project that is one of a kind.
Working together, they created a giant, six-metre grain of seed from used machine parts as a symbol of growth, love, energy, agriculture and creativity. This sculpture also embodies growth and vitality. From a tiny seed grows an ear of wheat, full of other grains. With deep gratitude, we associate this wonder with our company’s own development story.
This was a spontaneous project. “I happened to see Mr Plotnikov’s exhibition, which I really liked. And since both I and HORSCH support regional art, the idea came to me to create an art sculpture for the new building that will house the marketing department,” says marketing department head Cornelia Horsch.
The brief was a challenging one. The sculpture had to relate to agriculture, embody the growth process itself, and connect to machinery. That’s when Vasyl Plotnikov came up with the idea of building a giant grain of seed out of used machine parts. The seed-grain idea met all these requirements, and the growth-process motif will continue to be used in the new building’s design too. “For me, this project was both interesting and challenging.
Not every day do you get to create such large sculptures carrying deep meaning. Wheat also has a sacred and Christian meaning – new life and growth are central themes in art,” says sculptor Vasyl Plotnikov. What’s more, this project is also international and forward-looking in nature. The so-called daisy-shaped discs that make up the sculpture aren’t new.
They were sent to Schwandorf from all across Europe. These are soil-cultivation and seeding equipment parts from the factory’s customers, who were contacted and asked to send in unneeded, used discs to HORSCH. Sculptor Vasyl Plotnikov himself worked on the sculpture, together with well-known blacksmith Manfred Becher from Pullenried and all of HORSCH’s vocational training apprentices.
Specially for this, a forge was built for Manfred Becher on the Sitzenhof estate, near the welding shop. It had everything you’d find in a real forge: a blacksmith’s hammer, an anvil, and a furnace reaching 1000 degrees – everything here smoked and sparked as the hammer struck the red-hot iron. And so, through the old art of the blacksmith, a new, modern work for the future came into being.
