LIKE ENTRANCE MONEY INTO PARADISE
Copper, silver and gold are at least as noble as lapislazuli, ultramarine, linen, linseed-oil, polivinyl acetate, paper, eggs and grinded bricks.
I designed the coins in the size of a soup plate; then the modeller forms it into plaster, and I continue to shape it until it is ready to be reduced to coin size. So the coins are not copies of my paintings.
When I was first asked to make coins, I was very, very sceptical and almost against it. But this is always so when I am offered to work with a new material, if it is lithography, engraving, tapestry, silkscreen or glass.
But afterwards, when I had my first results in hand, at first soup plate size in plaster, then coin size, I got more and more enthusiastic.
Now, I carry the first coins always with me in my pocket as small works of art which I show to everybody.
They are not money-coins in the usual sense because they are no legal currency. Maybe one could pay with my coins? That would be wonderful.
My coins have no face and revers as usual but only a front side. On the revers there are embossed seals, stamps representing the hall-mark, the modeller’s sign, the seal of the Austrian Mint, the editor’s sign and the copyright sign, the year, the title and number of the work, the running edition number and my signature in gothic letters and in Japanese.
Furthermore, the coins are not round but have irregular edges. The metal will be denaturated. The silver will be blackened with sulphur and will not look like new silver anymore. The copper will be darkened or greened by means of acid to get a verdigris aspect like the old Roman coins.
The result is extraordinary. It is like things hundred or thousand years old, mysterious like ancient engravings, like very old rediscovered treasures.
If you hold such a heavy piece of metal in your hand with all its light and shadow effects and the black and verdigris in the depths, you feel as if you walked into a wonderland. The plastic forms create a new dimension. The unreal of my shapes and forms becomes real to touch and feel even for the blind. Therefore, it becomes twice unreal because such shapes and forms must not be and can not be real. Otherwise we would already be in paradise.
It is really incredible to be able to carry such a picture in the pocket of your trousers without it getting worn out or ugly. On the contrary. It becomes always better and more beautiful.
From time to time, you touch it with your fingers, you take it out of your pocket and look at it all wet in the pouring rain or in the bath under the water or in a glass of water or in the sun or it shines at candle light when you turn and turn it about.
And when night comes you feel the forms with your hands. At night, under the blanket when you are lonely or when you lie sick in a hospital bed between sterile walls, or when you die alone, I think it is beautiful to have something like this in your hand. You can warm yourself with it like with a hot stone. Or cool yourself like with a snow crystal or with a piece of blue ice. You can put the coins into fire or into water.
Here, all my worlds are concentrated and represented like a beautiful déjà-vu of Eden.
It is like a renaissance, like a resurrection in a new dimension.
It is like entrance money into paradise.
Written in Kaurinui on 1 October 1978 on occasion of his designs for coins.
Published in:
Hundertwasser Coin catalogue, Glarus/Switzerland: Gruener Janura AG 1978, pp. 3-6
Schurian, Walter (ed.): Hundertwasser – Schöne Wege, Gedanken über Kunst und Leben. (Beautiful Paths – Thoughts on Art and Life) Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (dtv), 1983, pp. 80-82 and ed. 2004 (Munich, Langen Müller Verlag), pp. 97-98 (German)
Schmied, Wieland (ed.): Hundertwasser 1928–2000, Catalogue Raisonné. Vol. II: Fürst, Andrea Christa: Catalogue Raisonné. Cologne: Taschen 2002, pp. 1022-1023 (excerpts, German and English)