German woodworker and artist Winfried Krueger calls his unusual collection “The World’s Smallest Planer Museum.”
Klein-Rogan – How long ago did you pick up a planer, or at least declined the word in singular or even plural? Winfried Krüger, a 69-year-old collector from the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, is currently looking to put many of his decades-old planers into safe hands.
According to dpa, a news agency which shared pictures from the small rural municipality of Klein-Rohan, there are more than 1600 planers stored in the sixteen-square-meter workshop of a retired professional carpenter.
The oldest of them date back to the first half of the 19th century. Some, for example, were used during the reconstruction of Schwerin Castle in 1845-1857. The Landtag parliament, or parliament of the state, is now housed in this palace complex. Winfried Krueger calls his collection “the smallest planer museum in the world”.
There are about two dozen types of planers used for different purposes, among them the planer, the rebounder and the tongue-and-groove planer.
Planed in Germany
In the local East German region, Winfried Krueger is also known for another unusual hobby: creating erotic sculptures and images out of wood. These artifacts have now remained out of the agency’s camera field of view, but you can look at them in YouTube reports in German (“Der Holzerotiker” and “Winfried Krüger und seine Penis-Kollektion”) – though after age confirmation. Be warned, however, that there are many wooden phalluses, vaginas, breasts, there is also one frivolous, but quite critical composition with Angela Merkel, something like the satirical carriages at the Rhine carnival, but in miniature. As the artist himself emphasizes, nothing pornographic, only erotic.
Winfried Krueger considers wood to be a very warm, soft and sensual material. The first work carved from wood was an ordinary chess piece – half a century ago. Unusual branches, snags and outgrowths, in which he recognizes future erotic (and other) forms, the amateur artist looks for himself during walks in the woods. As you can learn from the video, he prefers to create to the music of Rammstein.
In fact, he began to carve penises from wood by accident – at a young age, after a successful joke. Once for fun he carved a male symbol out of a carrot and put it into his wife’s box for lunch at work… The surprise was a great success among the colleagues.
However, phallic symbols are not the only thing you can see in the workshop. You can see a variety of works in the studio, not only with erotic overtones, but the basic theme of creativity can be traced unequivocally. The author is not going to part with these exhibits.