20-06-2025
Bavaria's bootleg Banksy swaps spray paint for sticks and stones
Towards the end of last summer, Tom Fredl, a professional hunter on the Gut Oberfrauenau estate in eastern Bavaria, was doing his daily rounds through the woods when he saw something odd out of the corner of his eye.
'I often think about what fantastical sculptures nature creates,' he said. 'But then I suddenly caught sight of these little stone men along one of the forest trails.' Someone had piled up neat little stacks of rocks, most of them no taller than a child, on tree stumps and small mounds of soil, in such a way that they almost resembled human figures.
Fredl shrugged and went about his business, reasoning that walkers often left similar impromptu sculptures in the Alps.
By the time he returned to the track a few days later, though, the structures had multiplied. He found strange shapes made from moss, heaps of pine cones arranged like faces, and gnarled roots assembled into reaching arms.
'You can't miss them once you've got an eye for them,' Fredl said.
So far more than 30 mysterious sculptures have appeared in the forest and the hunt is on for the artist, dubbed the 'Banksy of the Bavarian forest'.
Alexandra von Poschinger, a culture writer from the family that has owned the Gut Oberfrauenau estate for more than 400 years, said it was tricky to define the sculptor's style.
'It looks as though the artist makes their decisions spontaneously on the spot,' she said. 'Sometimes they make conspicuous solitary figures, landmarks that are medium-sized or even as tall as a man. Sometimes they make groups of sculptures that look like gatherings of individuals who have found a connection with each other. Depending on which angle you look at them from, they remind you of people, animals or fantastical creatures.'
Months of investigations have so far yielded no real clues about the guerrilla artist's identity. Gerhard Wilhelm, the estate's chief forester, said it was probably a local as no casual visitor would stray on to the remote tracks where the works had materialised.
'Nor can I imagine that a woman is making these sculptures,' Wilhelm said. 'Given the weight of the stones, branches and roots the artist uses, she'd have to be very strong indeed. Perhaps it's two people at work — who knows?'
The secret sculptor is by now the talk of the town in Frauenau, the nearest settlement, whose parish council has scheduled a discussion of the topic for the coming week.
In a whodunnit, the first question any self-respecting detective would ask is who stands to benefit.
A particularly cynical sleuth might suspect the answer is the estate itself, which has energetically publicised the artworks in its magazine, the Gut News, styling them as 'Bavaria's most secret sculpture park' — presumably in the hope of attracting more paying visitors.
Von Poschinger said she understood the suspicion but gave her 'word of honour' that it was a genuine mystery and not just an elaborate PR stunt.
