About the Foundation
The Wagenbach Foundation was founded three years after the discovery of Joseph Wagenbach’s life and oeuvre. The reclusive immigrant from Germany had created a pandemonium of sculptures in his small house on Robinson Street, Toronto, where he had resided since 1962. After a severe stroke in 2006, Wagenbach was not considered well enough to live on his own and forced to reside in several retirement houses, before he was taken in into a basement apartment at Crawford Street, Toronto. However in summer of 2007 disappeared from there, traceless to this date.

Mandate of the Foundation
The Joseph Wagenbach Foundation manages Wagenbach’s artistic legacy. This encompasses the archiving of his works and research into his biography, the creation of a digital inventory, the organization and curation of national and international shows of his work and the dissemination of information about his Art work. The institute also issues limited edition prints of select drawings and bronze casts of his original sculptures.

Discovering Joseph Wagenbach
In the fall of 2006, more than 1,500 visitors took the hour-long guided tour through the house of the reclusive, incapacitated Joseph Wagenbach, led by an archivist of the "Municipal Archives". Shortly after their encounter with the obsessive sculptural production and Joseph's tangible biography, visitors were informed that in fact the house was an installation artwork, a narrative in three-dimensions. Joseph was a fictional protagonist in this narrative, as fictional as the Municipal Archives themselves. The project was subsequently placed into the context of contemporary art with a panel discussion at the Toronto Goethe Institut and accompanying reviews.

However, although Joseph Wagenbach does not exist, his sculptures do.