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For the design of the “Paradiso” sculpture park to be installed behind the Fuchs Villa in Hütteldorf in the early 2000s, the artist created the monumental bronze sculpture “Esther”, who wears a magnificent gilded crown on her head. A connection can be traced to the biblical Queen Esther, the wife of the Persian King Ahasuerus, who saved her people, the Jews, from annihilation with her negotiatory skill. Yet Ernst Fuchs certainly also knew the far more ancient meaning of the name, which means “goddess” in Babylonian and “young woman” in Sanskrit. He thus gives the sculpture a meaning that goes beyond the biblical context.

Ernst Fuchs’ Esther, with her expansive hips and plump breasts covered by golden leaves, is a symbol of fertility and femininity familiar to us from many cultures since the Palaeolithic Age. With its closed eyelids, her face is reminiscent of Apsara heads – those half-human, half-divine women of Hindu and Buddhist mythology – and of the Khmer heads that can be admired in the famous Bayon temple in Angkor Thom. Ernst Fuchs has studied ancient cultures intensively and repeatedly incorporates their canon of figures and mythologies into his diverse body of work. Thus, the attributes given to Esther have also been carefully chosen by the artist. On her outstretched left arm; we see a twig with a budding blossom as a sign of immortality; as well as of femininity, love and fertility. The right arm is entwined by a snake winding its way towards the woman’s shoulder. In Ancient Egypt, as in many ancient eastern cultures, the snake was an expression of supreme divine and royal power. It is a primordial symbol of life, renewal, rejuvenation and resurrection on the one hand, and of death and destruction on the other. In the Bible, the snake is not only the tempter who causes the expulsion from Paradise, but also a symbol of power and wisdom – and, as the companion of many different goddesses, embodies the female logos.

(Sophie Cieslar)