Connecting Volumes, a large-scale sculpture composed of weathered steel and juxtaposing lines and curves, has a permanent home at the corner of Lincoln and Lady Streets, near the entrance to the Vista Greenway, which connects the Vista to Finlay Park through a 100-year-old railroad tunnel. 

The artists who designed and built the structure are Klaus Hartmann and Reiner Mahrlein of Kaiserslautern, Germany, which is one of Columbia’s sister cities. The two artists are known in Germany and throughout Europe for their public sculptures, and are known around Columbia’s art scene because they have been visiting Columbia off and on since the early 2000s.

In addition to transatlantic friendship, the work also combines two sensibilities that produce very different sculptural forms. Hartmann has a fixation on the forms of ship vessels, exploring different ways that he can take the unfriendly cold of steel, the vast size of ships, and make them appealing to an untrained eye. Mahrlein, on the other hand, tends to explore tension and pressure. His work often uses granite and steel to explore such concepts, he says, “because one is man-made and the other is natural, but they are both made from the element of fire.”

The artwork carries a message for Columbia. Our city can be hard and sharp in the way its citizens address each other over community tensions, but Columbians are also capable of showing softness and an eagerness to gather together and take a break from the day. To the extent that public art can send a public message, Connecting Volumes is trying to tell us not only to value our connection to Kaiserslautern, but also to value our connection to each other.