Wooden sculptures, Rooster: 50 x 70 x 17 cm, chicken: 14 x 60 x 17 cm
Anyone who wonders where the colorful wooden sculptures in the restaurant come from - the rooster, the chicken, the waiter and, during advent season, angels as well - will inevitably come across Eugeniusz Zegadło (*1943 in Suchedniow, Poland). His traditional woodcarving works were shown at the Academy in 2000 and 2015 (both with the title "Polish Woodcarving Art") and very popular with the guests of our vernissages.

The Zegadło family has been devoted to traditional woodcarving art for four generations and is very well known in Poland. Eugeniusz Zegadło’s art is mainly devoted to sacral themes, but also to the animal world or fantastic motifs in the simple, carefree style of Polish folk art. Since the 1960s, he has been making both small and up to 5-metre high, lively sculptures, as imaginative as life itself: sometimes sad, sometimes happy, sometimes demonic. He creates characteristic faces, colorful birds, mangers and again and again biblical motifs. The material he uses is mainly lime wood, painted with oil paints, which he dilutes according to his own recipe. The painting takes about as long as the carving.

Poland is not only a neighboring country of Germany, but also one of the important countries of origin of the seminar participants at the Europäische Akademie Otzenhausen, which currently works mainly with school partners in Poland. However, contacts have existed for much longer: even before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Academy had been promoting rapprochement between Poles and Germans in its own way. For this reason, Polish artists must not be missing in the art collection of the Academy.