“The ‘Reclining Figure’ is a classic sculptor motif. I only really became aware of it, when I saw Wieland Förster’s ‘Large Reclining Figure’ in front of Edeka on Singerstrasse not far from Berlin’s Ostbahnhof. The sculpture is installed in front of the department store and around it a concrete ensemble, on which children or dogs are waiting for their parents or mistresses. People are often taking a break, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes at the ‘Reclining’! I think that’s beautiful, because that’s where visual art meets a piece of substantiveness, reality or whatever you call it. While the sculpture can still assert itself in this whole jumble of cigarettes, empty beer bottles and graffiti tags. It doesn’t lose its charisma in any way.

It is also interesting that Wieland Förster’s ‘Large Reclining Figure’ is a kind of response to Henry Moore’s ‘Reclining Figure’ in what was then West Berlin in front of the Academy of Arts. Moore’s ‘Reclining’ was set up in front of a cultural center in 1962 – Förster’s ‘Reclining’ a few years later in front of a department store. But I also encountered this motif again and again in other areas – the dormant areas as an adventure playground of my childhood in East Berlin or the lying stones (pavement) as the basis of my forays through Berlin in the 1990s as a teenager.

The cigarette is actually an abstract form (tube), while only the coloring turns it into a cigarette and suddenly quite a few viewers can relate to it – everyone has a story about cigarettes. You could also say, it’s a trick: Nobody wants to deal with the superficially boring, old-school motif of the ‘Reclining Figure’, actually you hardly see them anymore. But if it’s a lying cigarette, then maybe it looks different and you say to yourself: ‘How beautiful a reclining figure can be! So calm, I could learn a lesson from that!'”

– Wilhelm Klotzek