Igor Mitoraj in Bamberg & Germany
Germany holds one confirmed permanent Mitoraj sculpture — Centurione I (1987), standing at the eastern end of the Untere Brücke (Lower Bridge) in Bamberg's UNESCO World Heritage Old Town. It is among the most visited Mitoraj works in Central Europe, and one of the earliest monumental Centurione castings in any public collection. Germany also hosted a significant temporary exhibition in Berlin in 2013. This page documents both.
Centurione I — 1987
Centurione I stands at the eastern end of the Untere Brücke — the Lower Bridge over the Regnitz river — in the heart of Bamberg's UNESCO World Heritage Old Town. The sculpture is a monumental version of the Centurione I series: an oversized fragment of a youthful face, missing both eyes, most of the forehead, and the entire back of the head. What remains — chin, lips, nose, one complete and one partial eye socket — emerges from the bronze as if from millennia of excavation.
The location is exceptional. The Untere Brücke is one of the most photographed spots in Bamberg, with the mediaeval Old Town Hall rising directly from the river and the towers of Michelsberg Abbey visible on the hill behind. Mitoraj's fragment — a Roman soldier's face, damaged by time — is in constant visual dialogue with the Baroque and Romanesque architecture surrounding it. Visitors approaching from either bank cannot miss it; it has become as characteristic of Bamberg's waterfront as the town hall itself.
The sculpture first came to Bamberg in 2000 as part of a three-month exhibition of Mitoraj's monumental sculptures and drawings. Its reception was strong enough that the Friends of the International Artists' House Villa Concordia e.V. — the cultural association that manages Bamberg's prestigious international artists' residency — acquired it permanently, with support from the Oberfrankenstiftung (Upper Franconia Foundation) and private donors. It has stood on the Untere Brücke ever since.
Reviewers note an unusual perceptual quality: viewed from the north, the hollow interior of the face creates an optical illusion — the concave surface appears convex, making the empty skull seem to follow the viewer as they move. This phenomenon, known as the hollow face illusion, is particularly striking in the Bamberg installation due to the angle at which the sculpture is approached from the bridge.
Centurione I — The Monumental Scale
The Bamberg Centurione I shows what the small-edition desktop bronzes (19 cm, edition of 250) look like when scaled to monumental proportions. The compositional language is identical — the same face angle, the same horizontal band across the eyes, the same sense of a fragment extracted from a larger, lost whole. But at monumental scale, the work acquires a completely different register: it is no longer intimate but confrontational, no longer domestic but civic.
For collectors who own the small Centurione I or II editions, the Bamberg installation provides the most accessible encounter with what Mitoraj intended at full scale. The Bamberg cast was produced from the same compositional model as the desktop editions. The relationship between the table bronze and the monumental work is direct — not a different sculpture, but the same form at a different resolution.
The Centurione series remains among the most actively traded Mitoraj editions on the secondary market. If you own a Centurione I or II bronze — in any condition, with or without its original base — I am actively seeking to acquire additional examples.
Berlin — Ministry of Foreign Affairs Exhibition, 2013
20 Monumental Bronzes — January to July 2013
In early 2013, Igor Mitoraj — then 68 years old and in the final eighteen months of his life — installed twenty monumental bronze sculptures on the grounds of Germany's Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) at Werderscher Markt in central Berlin. The exhibition ran from 16 January to 31 July 2013. All works were produced at the Pietrasanta foundries where Mitoraj maintained his studio.
The placement at the Foreign Office was institutionally significant: the building, designed by architects Müller Reimann Architekten, is one of the most prominent government buildings in reunified Berlin, on the axis between the Brandenburg Gate and the Gendarmenmarkt. A contemporary sculptor being given that forecourt — and that institutional endorsement — was a statement of the German cultural establishment's regard for Mitoraj's work.
The exhibition was not open to the public in the conventional sense: visiting required advance appointment. This made it primarily accessible to diplomatic, cultural, and collector circles rather than general tourism — which in retrospect gives it a particular significance as an institutional rather than popular event.
Germany & the Mitoraj Collector Market
German buyers have been consistently active in the Mitoraj secondary market. Auction houses including Hampel Fine Art Auctions in Munich and Van Ham in Cologne have achieved strong results for Centurione and Persée series bronzes. The German collector base tends to favour the architectural quality of the torso series — Persée, Asclépios — and the graphic clarity of the Centurione heads.
The Bamberg installation has given German audiences direct experience of Mitoraj's monumental scale since 2000, contributing to consistent regional awareness of his work. Collectors in Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, and the Rhine-Main corridor are among the most active German buyers at European auction houses for his small-edition bronzes.
If you are based in Germany and own a Mitoraj work — bronze, marble, lithograph, or drawing — I buy directly and privately, without commission. I respond to every enquiry personally within 24 hours.
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