A huge squadron of aircraft made of gray cardboard hangs from the ceiling, some are on shelves on the wall, each with a three-digit number on the landing gear.
Hans-Jörg Georgi has long since lost track of how many aircraft he has already built.
The seventy-two-year-old maneuvers skillfully in his wheelchair between his desk, where he is cutting pieces of cardboard, and a half-finished aircraft.
He had polio and spent years in hospitals because his legs were broken and then supposed to grow back together in a stretched bed.
It was a common method of treatment at the time, but it was very painful for the young patients.
In addition, it remained unsuccessful with him: he was never able to walk properly, moves in a wheelchair in the narrow studio, otherwise with a walking aid.
With the donations of the FAZ readers, the studio in Sachsenhausen is not only to be expanded, but also to receive an elevator so that people like Georgi can also get to the other studios.
Many works were destroyed
Georgi has been sketching and building airplanes for many decades; on thousands of drawings he has depicted all real types and built an extensive fleet of model airplanes out of cardboard. Most of the works, so his supporters report, were probably destroyed before Georgi came to the Goldstein studio 20 years ago. Nobody in the home for the disabled in which he lived had considered it art; his room was considered littered. Until the moment when Christiane Cuticchio, the founder of Atelier Goldstein, looked for talent there and discovered the man's extraordinary artistic talent.
The fact that what he produced in his small dorm room was always thrown away and disposed of at first did not prevent Georgi from continuing to draw and build.
He took paper for the pencil drawings and used cardboard boxes for his models from the waste containers in the workshop for the disabled where he was working at the time.
Even today he is modest in the choice of materials.
He continues to chop up gray cardboard - which now comes from the art supply trade - into small, irregular pieces and glues them into stable, three-dimensional bodies, the shape of which he plans, but which sometimes only emerges in detail during the work process.
In some of the larger aircraft there is a cube made of wooden slats to give the models more stability and durability.
In addition to the lifelike models, such as a Junkers Ju, he also developed flying fantasy structures, which he calls “six storeys”: They look like oversized cruise ships that would certainly have a difficult time lifting off the ground in reality. These seemingly utopian flying cities are for him a kind of Noah's Ark, with which humanity can save itself in the event of the earth becoming uninhabitable, when "stupid evil", as he calls it, vaguely as it is belittling, strikes again . That, he explains with a concerned expression, will force us to leave the world one day. He will then decide who is allowed to enter such a six-storey building. He leaves it completely open whether he is thinking of a nuclear emergency, a climate catastrophe or a pandemic,how we experience it in the present and how it repeatedly gives rise to discussions, to express fears and worries, but also to artistic processing among the cognitively impaired artists in the studio.
But Georgi prefers to talk about technical details: solar power is supposed to catapult the projectiles into orbit, only the good guys would then survive there. He meticulously explains the location of the fog lights, talks about compressors filled with oxygen and how the lift works. Some models are adorned with a stylized blue Lufthansa crane, otherwise the planes are as gray as the cardboard from which they are made. There is also a twin-engine camping plane in its huge fleet that is supposed to function like a flying bus for its imaginary passengers. His rescue scenario reflects his open and friendly, but very concerned view of the world.
In addition to the models and the six-storey floors, there are also forms of human machines under the ceiling of the studio, which are a flying object and at the same time a kind of ethereal air being. They have ghostly or animal-like heads and bodies. Does he see himself as such a being? Flying may seem like the best way out when the legs are not working properly.
Georgi is one of the oldest artists in the studio and has had numerous exhibitions at home and abroad, even in China and Australia. Even the renowned Art Magazin devoted three full pages to him and his art. According to his sponsors, he is also a very good draftsman, but the drawings are very personal and are therefore not exhibited. He dyed his full hair dark black. He also likes to wear lederhosen, a bit like an aging rock star. He much prefers to listen to Schlager and knows a lot of the lyrics by heart. When he talks, he likes to switch seamlessly from High German to Frankfurt and then to Saxon. He giggles when he irritates his counterpart.
He has been a pensioner for a number of years and no longer needs to go to the workshop.
So on the days when he is not in the studio, he just continues to work at home in the dormitory.
Nothing is thrown away anymore.