Hatched Baby coming down, could be that way for some time

The Hatched Baby saga continues.

It’s coming down and may not go back up for some time.

“We’re going to remove the sculpture until it can be repaired by the artist,” Mayor Mitch Reynolds said Tuesday on La Crosse Talk. “I don’t know when that will happen. Or until the artist hires someone to repair it. The whole thing has to come down. It suffered some significant damage.”

Over the weekend, the giant egg statue with what used to be a blue baby’s head coming out of it, was vandalized. The head was torn from the egg and the face ripped off.

Photos of the face appeared on a somewhat popular social media page in someone’s living room and another in a laundry room. Posts that have since been deleted.

La Crosse Police have yet to release video of the incident, because they’re still investigating.

Monday morning, police did get a call that the face was lying in their yard on King Street. So, the complete artwork is back in one place.

La Crosse Parks and Rec. project specialist Jim Flottmeyer told WIZM the piece is valued around $23,000.

German artist Wolfgang Auer created the piece, using his daughter’s 2007 birth as inspiration and the anxieties he associates with parenthood. Auer is from Friedberg, Germany, a sister city to La Crosse. He has created many pieces of art depicting babies with blue skin.

“If he would like to hire someone to do it, that’d be fine with us,” Reynolds added. “If he’d like to come here and do it himself, that’s fine. It’s a piece of art. Can’t do that in the basement of city hall.”

It was in Ohio before coming to La Crosse in April of 2018.