125 years Bildgiesserei Noack
Photo: Roman März
Next Friday, November 11, the anniversary will be celebrated with 800 invited guests from culture, society, politics and business. For this purpose, the workshop gallery will open a retrospective of international sculpture from 125 years from modernism to the present with around 50 museum works that were once cast at Noack.
In the 125th year of its existence, the Noack sculpture foundry is today one of the five most important bronze foundries in the world. The traditional company created such famous monuments as the Quadriga for the Brandenburg Gate or St. George for the dome of the Kremlin as monumental sculptures. In addition, almost all of Germany's modern art was cast here and the British sculptor Henry Moore had around 1,000 large sculptures cast here after the war.
More recently, important artists such as ZERO founder Heinz Mack and neo-Dadaist Jonathan Meese have had their entire sculptural oeuvre cast in bronze here, just as today international artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Rosemarie Trockel, Tony Cragg, Nicole Eisenman, Georg Baselitz, Jonathan Meese, Bunny Rogers, Rainer Fetting and many others place their trust in the company with their production.
Hardly any German company has ever been so closely linked to the international art market and has been able to help shape art history as the owner-managed Berlin-based company, now in its fourth generation. The company's sales have developed just as steadily, and in recent years Bildgießerei Hermann Noack GmbH + Co. KG's sales of 2.8 million (2018), 3.0 million (2019), 3.2 million (2020), 3.2 million (2021), an almost steady increase in sales of about 6 percent, which was generated on the property with 10,000 square meters of floor space overbuilt with the foundry on 5,000 square meters with about 40 skilled workers in Berlin-Charlottenburg.
In the process, Noack not only produced, but also delivered and erected Europe's largest bronze sculpture. The herd of 14 bronze bulls weighs 80 tons and is a sculpture by the now 95-year-old Austrian sculptor Jos Pirkner. The sculpture, which is more than 20 meters long, was realized in collaboration with Noack from 2009 to 2014 for the Red Bull headquarters in Fuschl am See, Austria.
Many of the works produced by Noack are now in the most important international museums and private collections, such as the entire artistic oeuvre in bronze of the Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys, whose bronze-aluminum cast environment "Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch" from 1983, went with its entire edition to London's Tate Modern, the MMK Frankfurt, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
Sustainable transformation remains a central focus for the company's development. This includes climate-friendly considerations as well as materials procurement geared to sustainability. The company is also responding to global crises, such as shortages of raw materials or armed conflicts that affect the energy and transportation sectors. The company is currently converting from gas to electricity for its furnaces at great financial expense in order to remain competitive.
