The Iron Man from the Iron Mountain
-- behind this archaic alliteration stands physician and
scientist Prof. Claus-Frenz Claussen,
neuro-otologist and, since the seventies, a metal artist
as well. In his academic role, he is a senior professor
and teaches in gray flannels at the Alma Julia in
Würzburg. As a metal artist, he works in welder's
leathers and proletarian blue in his own studio in the
Franconian town of Eisenbühl [lit. Iron Ridge or
Iron Hill].
It all began over thirty years ago with a model four
or five feet square with which Claussen hoped, by means
of a sort of collage, to make the functional pathways of
the brain comprehensible. From there, it was only a short
step to more artistic creations. This first creation was
just a little whatsit compared to the scale of his
present work, but it led him into formal art studies,
oriented around the graceful, fragile figures of
Giacometti, separately conceived sculptures that can be
playfully rearranged into new groups, and to "Clausen's
Birds" -- these latter done, in contrast to his earlier
work, with the cutting torch. These "firebirds" and
"caricature birds" have led him into a new theme:
mythology. Starting from his own mythological past -- he
comes from a Nordic Viking line -- he succeeds in uniting
the ephemeral present with the ageless stories of
humanity. At first the the physician-artist "operated" on
a variety of material but eventually turned exclusively
to metal.
