Atelier Lixenberg Dronten NL

Shalom (Cyril) Lixenberg (Londen, July 5. 1932 - Amsterdam, January 10. 2015) was a British-Netherlands sculptor and graphic artist.

The artist Cyril Lixenberg strives in his work for a minimum of means. The shapes he uses are the circle, the triangle and the square. He experiments with these endlessly. The forms constantly change function, capacity and context. As a result, he never lapses into repetition. His use of colour is mostly limited to the primary colours: red, yellow and blue. His sculptures also have a graphic appearance. He manipulates these shapes until a spatial object arises. Many of Lixenberg's sculptures can be found in the Flevopolder in The Netherlands. They form an unexpected element in the vast, simple landscape.

Atelier Lixenberg Dronten NL
Rarely has an artist determined the image of a municipality as strongly as the sculptor and graphic artist Cyril Lixenberg in Dronten in the Flevopolder. The artist had his studio and storage space here, which still houses his legacy. When he settled there, Dronten was still in full development. Lixenberg is everywhere in infinitely spacious Dronten. The fact of the immense space, growth and potential has been a great inspiration for Lixenberg's work, partly because it invited him to think big. The most visible manifestation of this is the sculpture route, consisting of 26 sculptures in the public space that were created on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Dronten in 1997.

The bond between Dronten and Lixenberg has a long history that can be called unusual and unique not only for this municipality. It started in the mid-1980s when a couple wanted to exhibit art on part of their land. They came into contact with Cyril Lixenberg and he immediately saw more possibilities. He had made three sculptures for a temporary exhibition in Breda: a square, a circle and a triangle, which were placed in a straight line behind each other. He immediately saw those sculptures in front of him, but then on the dike of the Ketelmeer. The sculptures were placed in 1988 and are still there.

From the introduction to Cyril Lixenberg a friendship with the city grew. He visited regularly. At the time no one could have foreseen that Dronten would eventually become the city of Cyril Lixenberg. In exchange for a number of monumental works of art, Lixenberg acquired a piece of building land in the municipality of Dronten on which he established his studio and storage. It led to an exceptional, years-long collaboration between the artist and the city in the making. As Dronten grew, countless sculptures by Lixenberg were erected along important access and transit roads.