Client: Caritas Düsseldorf

Overview

New Zeitgeist | In 2020, Gabriel was commissioned to design the chapel windows of the new Caritas Center St. Hildegard in Düsseldorf. The glass artwork, comprising 7 individual parts, is an essential sacral component of his new conceptions of smaller catholic, multifunctional types of chapels. Altar and ambo always remain movable for all mass services, but the glass art continues to form the “comforting” and „deep moving” foundation of the “sacred space”. People are today still deeply belonging for color and symbolism, for luminous glass art – all in the light of the creation. Perhaps even more than ever in our Zeitgeist.

Background | Hildegard von Bingen was the most important mystic and influential universal scholar of the Middle Ages. In the Roman Catholic Church, she is venerated as a saint: Pope Benedict elevated her in 2012 to the worldwide church scholar “Doctor Ecclesiae universalis”. She is also deeply venerated in all the Anglican, Old Catholic and Protestant churches and is remembered with many memorial days. Her former place of work, the Ruppertsberg monastery, is beautifully situated in the midst of Gabriel’s homeland. His stained glass windows for Hildegard reflect his reverence for her feminine life force and resonate more deeply, as it were, with his devotion

Goals

Symbo|ic | In countless design and creation processes, Gabriel symbolically slowly opened the basic structure of the "cross", drew in completely intuitively executed mixed technics - ith pencils, charcoal and watercolor pencils - new forms, which condensed, however, again and again to a "cross" to rise again transcendently from it - to be free. And yet, as it were, to be connected with "him". The basic forms had touching him as an artist - he ultimately increasingly with parallel color compositions, which he referred to the work and life of Hildegard von Bingen, artistically brought together on the computer - and worked out in several creative digital processes to the total work of art.

Process

Technique | Gabriel decided to give his painterly very expressive work into the artistic hands of the „Peters Studios“ in Paderborn. In order to achieve a strong painterly density with depth effect, he worked here quite consciously in each individual window on two individual glass art panes, which achieve only both together - with small distance between them - one behind the other with a wonderful color and form effect. For the seven individual windows, the artisan float glass painting was thus carried out in 14 windows on several levels as well as using many individual firings in the kilns of the glass studios. The result is a radiantly luminous total work of art, in deep symbiosis of artist and craftsman