Claus Bury. Hanau New Town Map

After training as a goldsmith and working as a successful jewellery designer, in the late 1970s Claus Bury decided in favour of a freer art and engaging with a large-scale format. Initially he worked with ephemeral and temporary sculpture, before realising enduring works in urban spaces or the open landscape – predominantly made of wood, yet occasionally also of stone, steel and aluminium.

His most recent enterable artwork, Hanau New Town Map, was created in 2020 during the partial renovation of this eponymous part of the city in the newly laid-out park on Französische Allee, next to the historic Walloon-Dutch Church. The ground relief unfolds over an area of 15 by 17 metres in a stringent cubic design in white granite.When designing it, Claus Bury orientated himself on a topographical view of Hanau by Matthäus Merian (1593–1650) as well as on the so-called Metzger plan, an ‘outline of the city and fortress of Hanau, which was published in several, partially amended editions in 1684 and 1735. The relief-type depressions in the floor work, in which the street names are also embedded, bring the historical Hanau of the seventeenth century back to life.

Following the 1597 star-shaped settlement of Calvinist religious refugees, the grid-styled linear network of streets surrounded by five rectangular stone benches picks up on the profile of the city wall and its gate-like openings.

The book presents the Hanau New Town Map project and its realisation in numerous images. Photographs taken by drone illustrate how the enterable sculpture has become part of Hanau’s cityscape, while texts by Martin Hoppe and Gerhard Kolberg situate Bury’s work within both the city’s past and art history.

A book on Claus Bury’s most recent enterable sculpture:an artwork in which history, the present and the future enter into a fruitful dialogue – for residents and guests of the city alike.