Otto Herbert Hajek (Kaltenbach [Nové Hutĕ], CZ 1927-2005, Stuttgart) is one of the most important artistic personalities of the 20th century in Germany. His art still shapes the Stuttgart cityscape today: the artist created over 50 sculptural works and "art in architecture" projects in the city, where he lived from 1947 until his death. The place where the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart stands today also shares a common history with Hajek: in 1969, he used visual art to transform the always controversial Kleiner Schlossplatz into a popular place of communication. The relationship between art and the built environment became his defining theme, which he realized in numerous commissions for square and architectural designs worldwide - for example in Adelaide, Australia, and Montevideo, Uruguay. Hajek saw his outdoor sculptures as "signs" that transform indeterminate urban space into a place of experience for urban people. Permeating public space with art in order to increase the quality of the space and create a sense of community remained a central concern of his artistic work throughout his life. However, it would fall short to limit Hajek's art to this socio-political and socio-cultural dimension. In the almost five decades of his artistic career, he created a multimedia oeuvre whose diversity defies categorization in terms of artistic genre. The extensive holdings of the O.H. Hajek Art Foundation, founded in 2003 by the artist himself, and the Otto Herbert Hajek Art Foundation of Sparda-Bank Baden-Württemberg are predestined to overcome this one-sided perspective.

The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart traces the sculptor's artistic development chronologically on the basis of 60 works, deliberately avoiding a separation of genres. The direct juxtaposition of sculpture, painting and graphic art reveals the rich variety of the geometric-constructive canon of forms that Hajek has developed over the years and tested in different media. His figurative-representational bronzes, reliefs and linocuts at the beginning of his career show religiously motivated subjects and are stylistically reminiscent of German Expressionism. At the same time, he was already creating works that were imbued with the abstract tendencies of modernism. From the mid-1950s, Hajek turned to Art Informel: the interplay of grid-like structures and organic forms is characteristic of the filigree bronzes in the work groups Raumknoten and Raumschichtungen. These works are presented in the exhibition together with ink drawings, including the rarely shown letters, in which gestural structures correspond with dense areas of color - and in which his color paths are already hinted at.

First presented at documenta III in 1964, the Color Paths are a defining milestone for Hajek's entire oeuvre. In these early examples of an environment, Hajek combines sculptural objects with strips of color that stretch across the floor and walls, creating a spatial structure. The boundaries between artwork and viewer, art object and environment are thus broken down. The exhibition includes exhibits that Hajek showed in 1966 at the Esslingen (op) art gallery, where he staged the idea of color paths in a particularly impressive way: At that time, the "color paths" did not end in the exhibition space, but extended over the building, along the streets through the city to the market square and over the sculptures on site. From the 1970s onwards, Hajek increasingly turned to painting. When designing his paintings, he drew on the fixed repertoire of geometric forms that also characterized his sculptural work - they therefore appear like two-dimensional sculptures. Preferably in the colors red, yellow, blue and gold, the paintings with their gestural traces in the otherwise uniform color spaces refer back to the informal works of the early years, diagonals in the picture in turn connect to the color paths. Finally, an exhibition room is dedicated to the design of public spaces with documentary films and prints. Accompanying the presentation at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Hajek's guiding principle of enlivening urban spaces through the site-creating power of art will be updated by the temporary intervention Platzprobe by the Stuttgart art collective UMSCHICHTEN on the Kleiner Schlossplatz: sculptural objects "test" the space on which they are placed, complementing and questioning it.

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