Private Passions

Alexander Polzin is a German sculptor, painter, costume and set designer. He began his career as a stonemason, but is now well known for his collaborations with writers, composers, choreographers and scientists. He has created sets, often drawing on his work in sculpture, for operas including Verdi’s Falstaff and Rigoletto, and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, for which he created huge illuminated stalactites, suspended above the stage. For a 2022 production of Mozart’s opera Mitridate in Copenhagen, the centrepiece was an enormous layered ochre-coloured rock formation, with which bodies merged or slid across. As a painter and sculptor, he’s enjoyed exhibitions in galleries around the world, and has collaborated with the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk, in 2016 and 2023. His work also appears in prominent public spaces, including his statue of Giordano Bruno in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.