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Showing posts from July, 2013

Helmut Herbst

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I heard the sad news that my old friend Helmut Herbst died a couple of weeks ago in Estonia. I first met Helmut in 2000. I had been working on the  Irwell Sculpture Trail  for about 3 years, commissioning new works and every now and then an artist I was working with would say that they were working on a similar project in a town called  Waiblingen  in Germany. After it had happened one too many times, I thought I'd have to see who the other curator was. So I arranged to visit Helmut in Waiblingen. I arrived at his office after dark on September evening and the first thing he did was open sparkling wine. We immediately got on personally and professionally sharing the challenges of curating in a satellite town (in his case Stuttgart) which appears marginal in geography and in artistic profile. Over the years since we have done various partnership projects and joint commissions. In 2007, Helmut retired from the Waiblingen Stadt Museum, somewhat disillusioned with that context as