At the time that apartheid was a worldwide political issue and rousing subject of discussion, she created her church windows in antique opal glass for the St. Marien-Liebfrauen basilica in Berlin-Kreuzberg. The windows reveal particularly innovative solutions: eight black saints against a colorful background self-confidently send out one of the most important Christian and political messages of our century: the Christian image of humankind linking all peoples and races.

In sculpture the artist provokes new ways of seeing as well. In 1980 she set an orange-red glass cube onto the gabled roof of the late classicist Matthai church by August Schüler, situated in central Berlin at the Potsdamer Platz between Mies‘ Nationalgalerie and Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonic concert hall. The cube of hand blown cased glass with a shimmering etched surface stood out as fiery eye-catcher from the wastelands of the then still empty gray terrain of the Berlin wall. Besides the larger-than-life glass sculpture consisting of two red glass sails as glass-etching collage for the Mildred-Scheel-Stiftung in Cologne, the fifteen-meter-high glass obelisk for the Berlin Theodor-Heuss-Platz is the area of monumental sculpture. The story of its construction is prolonged: In February 1987 Hella De Santarossa won a public competition to redesign the Theodor-Heuss-Platz in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

Again recent history and contemporary events inspired her concept. The site alone demanded a sensitive design, taking the square’s urban development and historical significance into consideration. After all, the sculpture was to stand on the central point of the kilometer-long east-west axis of Berlin, which led from central West Berlin past such historical places as the Ernst-Reuter-Platz, the Straße des 17. Juni, directly to the Brandenburger Tor and thus into the middle of the capital of the then still existing German Federal Republic. The concept represented a mirror of the times in the sign of the Perestroika and could be finally erected in the restless and overtaxed post-wall Berlin only in 1995. The outer skin of the obelisk carries text in the artist’s handwriting. They elevate the site, the history of Berlin and Perestroika to its central subject. The text selections are in turn the visible result of an intense analysis of the square’s history and meaning. The shape of the tall slim obelisk inspired Hella De Santarossa to new large objects, which are to be set up in various places around the world. The design for a – now monolithic – glass pillar for Johannesburg in South Africa took on material shape. The glass pillar with the red and gold casing proudly reflects the material and – though long time suppressed – cultural wealth of the South African Republic.

The obelisk’s translation into glass has yet to be realized. At the moment Hella Sanatarossa is working on a series of outstanding church windows for the gothic Heiliggeistkirche in Heidelberg. Five windows in total are being donated to the old university church.. They are thus the commissioners, to be an expression of a future-oriented art. In the white unadorned space of the Protestant church, one window can already be looked up to. It shows a partially shattered expressively painted glass consisting of many glass fragments layered over one another in wild collage and relief.

The window is composed in free and easy rhythms; in this it uncompromisingly denies an unambiguous interpretation, resists being part of a definite program, which art viewers like so much to find. And yet its composition does not strain the fine framework of the gothic window tracery, but uses it, so to speak, as a mantle – perhaps as expression of a world in which time and space has been broken up, but which nonetheless bows to higher divine whole?