BERLIN — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has the ability to provoke in art as well as in life.

Less than 28 hours after the Biennale art festival in the western German city of Wiesbaden set up a statue of the Turkish leader in a public square bearing the name “German Unity Place,” the mayor had it pulled down late Tuesday night, citing security concerns.

Sven Gerich, the mayor of Wiesbaden, a German city of about 275,000 people just west of Frankfurt, said on Wednesday that he and the city authorities valued freedom of art and sought to protect it, but that the statue — standing nearly four meters, or 13 feet — had crossed a line.

“An art installation that needs to be protected by a massive police presence in order to ensure the public peace was not proportional,” he said in a statement announcing that the statue, which went up Monday and was to have remained in place until the festival closed on Sunday, would not be reinstalled.