Michael Stockhausen, Curator and art historian
„The following will hardly involve a classification of the works along art historical parameters. Our point of departure is also not really the impressed viewer, although Heiko Börner’s perspective of (im)possibilities carved into the wood unquestionably challenge seeing and comprehending. Once the moment of surprise has subsided and we look, time and again, into the continual artistic production since 2000, the question arises: What do the works think?“ >> more
Angela Holzhäuer, Art historian
„Börner’s sculptures unfold an archaic, nuanced play of forms: woods are transformed into fascinating figures. His idiosyncratic, imaginative formal language ranges from the simple to the opulent, from the exuberantly sensual and chaotic to the coolly abstract, perfectly arrayed. The works are fragments of a fantasy world that survive the fleeting moment. They link tradition and modernity poetically.” >> more
Andreas Kühne and Christoph Sorger
„Heiko Börner charges wood, his material of choice, with a new and different meaning in the context of contemporary art. He neither lets nature speak directly, nor does he cause his material’s specific properties to vanish altogether. Distinct formal aims and the language of the material converge in an oeuvre that unites tension and harmony, realizing a visionary contemporary interpretation of art’s constructive principles.“ >> more
Prof. Dr. Kai Uwe Schierz, Director of the Art Museums of Erfurt
“Heiko Börner is a sculptor who hails from the tradition of woodcarving, but has conceptually distanced himself from it altogether. For Heiko Börner meets the traditional act of tracing the direction of wood’s growth and all its other singularities, such as knots and cracks, with concepts of form that can run strikingly counter to the wood and its character. He creates his sculptures based on experiences that correspond to the age of movies, TV and modern physics instead of through the adaptation of wood in an act of claiming it as the object of workmanship and formation. In this he is original and completely contemporary. Within his still young oeuvre we encounter work that deals with the conditions of its own creation, and that programmatically transport new media into the long-standing métier of woodcarving.”
Dr. Susann Ortmann, Art Historian
“For the sculptor Heiko Börner, the subject of movement is of particular interest because it meets resistance. A tree is rooted; even when it has been felled, it radiates more the impression of gravity and stasis than of that of momentum and mobility. All the greater the challenge seems to be to confront the material of wood with the themes of time and motion, in a sense, to break its character, and at least on a visual level to turn it into a completely different material. The result destabilizes our habits of perception and plays a trick on our general knowledge.”
Ludwig Zerull, art critic for the Hannoversche Allgemeine
“Heiko Börner knows how to model a lightness bordering on fragility out of massive wood, grown robustly over the course of decades and centuries. Heiko Börner sets the previously static and stoic wood into motion. He takes it apart optically without breaking it up physically, by factoring in the direction of the wood grain, recombining it in different directions of our visual perception. Starting out with stasis he attains shifts in direction that are so radical that they lay claim to the material, but are so fitting that they never forcibly bend the material. At the same time they are abstract, and yet equally characterized by the impression of creaturely movement.”