Bernhard Heiliger

[1] Heiliger began his artistic education with an apprenticeship as a stone carver and a course of study at the Stettiner Werkschule für Gestaltende Arbeiten from 1933 to 1936 under Kurt Schwerdtfeger, who had been a student of the Bauhaus.

In 1941 he was drafted into the army and served as a radio operator on the Eastern Front for two years, before he received an exemption from military service through the intervention of Breker.

This was followed by his participation in several prominent international exhibits, such as the documenta I & II in Kassel (1955 and 1959) and the Venice Biennale (1956), and by commissions such as sculptures for the German pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels.

The artist departed from the human figure in his second period (1962–1970), instead developing imagery of the "flight of birds and vegetable forms"[4] influenced by the nonrepresentational Informel style.

Kosmos 70, commissioned in 1970 by the city of Berlin for the restored Reichstag building,[1] marks the transition into Heiliger's final period, where spheres and angular forms linked by lines of wire allude to planets and solar systems.