Goalkeeper

History of the work

In the pedestrian zone between Wankdorf stadium and the building at Papiermühlestrasse 69 stands a goalkeeper in bronze, painted silver. The sculptor Marguerite Saegesser made it in 1957; in her SIKART entry the work is called 'Goalie', located at the 'former Wankdorf stadium'. Wikidata gives its height as four metres.

The figure is therefore older than today's stadium. The Wankdorf stadium, opened in 1925 and a venue of the 1954 World Cup, was demolished in August 2001; the new building put up in its place by 2005 has been called Stadion Wankdorf again since July 2020. The Longines clock from the old stadium also returned and was set up again on the square in front of the new building at the end of 2007.

Marguerite Saegesser was born in Bern in 1922. After school she studied at the conservatory in Lausanne, violin according to SIKART, music theory according to Wikipedia, and from 1942 to 1946 she trained as a sculptor with Milo Martin. Until the mid-1950s she cast bronze nudes in her teacher's style; then her forms grew longer, later she worked in iron and finally in Plexiglas. In the 1970s she gave up sculpture; from 1974 to 2004 she lived in the United States, latterly in Palo Alto, and turned to printmaking and painting close to Abstract Expressionism. She died in Muri near Bern in 2011. Her first solo exhibition in a museum was shown by the Kunstmuseum Thun in 2023.

The Goalkeeper thus belongs to the early, still figurative phase of her work. Her later direction can be seen in Bern in her iron sculpture of 1968 in the Tscharnergut estate; according to SIKART, the figurative disappeared from her work when she turned to iron.

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Kultur Stadt Bern, Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (offene Daten) · SIKART: Marguerite Saegesser (Rea Reichen) · Wikipedia (de): Marguerite Saegesser · Wikidata: Goalkeeper (Q84057236) · Wikimedia Commons: Bronzeplastik Goalkeeper (Marguerite Saegesser-Rüfenacht 1957) · Wikipedia (de): Stadion Wankdorf (1925) · Wikipedia (de): Stadion Wankdorf (2005)