"Horst Gläsker once described his sources of inspiration as "cultures deeply past".* Ancient Egyptian, Etruscan and even Melanesian objects and
works of architecture have always fascinated him. Indeed, they confirmed him in his own aesthetic vision. He has never consciously drawn his inspiration from foreign cultures.
On the contrary, it was always they that came to him and he could then simply immerse himself in them. What gave him assurance was that he could sense a kind of "world organization"
comparable with his own ideas. These ancient cultures, his sources of inspiration, considered buildings and objects to be equally important for life and for art: "They wanted to make life,
and survival, pleasant." Making life and survival pleasant was seen by Horst Gläsker not as a material luxury but as a spiritual one. It is precisely this component that he misses in the
ideology of our society today. "Basically I would like to do everything in such a way that it does me good," Gläsker says.* Art affords him the possibility of expressing such a sense
of well-being. The fact that he encounters these ancient cultural sources again and again shows us how very much alive this wish is in us all."
Quoted in translation, from: Heinz Thiel in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition: Horst Gläsker MALEREI UND SKULPTUR, Städtisches Gustav-Lübcke-Museum Hamm (Municipal Museum), 1990.
* Conversation with Horst Gläsker on 14.3.1985 and 4.7.1990
"Making its way through a great many "art-on-building" projects is a whole population of grotesquely bizarre figurines with widely spreading horns, mops of hair standing on end,
snake-like bodies or other attributes of barely definable parentage. Some of them, on the other hand, come straight out of ancient mythology and are hence readily identifiable.
Hordes of centaurs, satyrs, sirens and griffins mingle with unknown "scharans", "egolings", with American Indian and Oceanic spirits. For all their differences,
they all have something in common: they feature exceedingly clear, extremely articulated contours that soar, twist and turn, brim with sensuality. They play their pranks on their own
or with their peers in parks and on fountains, on mobiles or chandeliers. They are Gläsker's Wild Army, cropping up wherever the mischievous mates with the erotic, wherever the boring,
gray, bureaucratic world opens itself up to the delights of the mythological and the fantastic, the decorative and the ornamental, the excessive and the intensive."
Quoted, in translation, from: Manfred Schneckenburger in: Horst Gläsker Verführung des Raums, Verlag Lindinger + Schmid, publication accompanying the exhibition: KUNST RAUM DIALOG at the Haus der Architekten, Architektenkammer NRW, Düsseldorf 2006
