MUNICH.- Franz Erhard Walther is a key figure in the conceptual departure from the image in the European post-war avantgardes. Beyond the panel painting and a classical understanding of sculpture, he formulated a completely new work concept – in particular by including the viewer as a participant. Walther himself described the elements of place, time, space, body and language as his artistic means.
The gesture of a radical iconoclasm, which aimed to revise the narrative strategies of modernism, stands at the beginning of his oeuvre, which spans more than six decades. A young man with dishevelled hair and paint-splotched clothes sits cross-legged and barefoot in front of a silver bowl and, with his head held high, spits out a mixture of flour and water. Franz Erhard Walther called the photograph of this first action at the age of nineteen, atmospherically staged with light and shadow, “Attempt to be a Sculpture, Gargoyle” (1958). This early work already contains the entire essence of Walther’s future work and his radically expanded range of artistic practice. In the viewer’s mind, the figure of a sculpture carved in stone emerges; Walther, however, already infiltrated this notion with a living image of himself as a protagonist.
Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939 in Fulda, Hesse) has always been part of the international art scene. Nevertheless, his career has been marked by rejection and resistance. The visionary scope of his concept of art is only now, in retrospect, becoming apparent to a broad public, as testified to by the awarding of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2017.
With 250 works and numerous drawings, the retrospective at the
Haus der Kunst traces the development of his work, which continues without interruption to radiate into the art scene to this day.
Already in the early work, which began towards the end of the 1950s, ideas for imaginative and processual works became apparent. The first intensely coloured ‘word pictures’, such as “museum”, “I’m Outside”, “COLLECTION” and “NEW YORK”, already point far beyond what he had learned during his training in the typography class at the Werkkunstschule Offenbach. Conscious of his position as an outsider, Walther used these works at an early stage to formulate an astute criticism of the art industry. On the American West Coast one decade later, John Baldessari would create his own institution-critical linguistic images such as “Pure Beauty” and “Clement Greenberg”, which deal with the predominance of the East Coast, with New York as the place of interpretive sovereignty over modernism. Through documenta II (1959) and its attempt at a new openness towards the international avant-garde, Walther came into contact with original works of American Action Painting, Abstract Expressionism and German Art Informel. At the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, he was able to search for form in the formless in the free-spirited atmosphere of the class of K. O. Götz. He translated the gestural aspect of Informel painting into the gesture as action. The human power of imagination as an essential source of both action and form is one of his guiding ideas.
In his early years, which were marked by a great passion for experimentation, Walther lent form to a nearly inexhaustible number of pictorial concepts. He liberated himself from a dominant authorship in that the principle of randomness defined the pictorial composition: For this, he used coffee, vegetable oil, glue or soy sauce on paper and cardboard. In further work processes, such as erecting, stacking and stringing together, as in “Six Machine Boards with Oily Edges” (1962), he dealt with the mutability of space through the serial or formal arrangement of objects. Here, the processual and the action become clear as constants.
His alleged proximity to the aesthetics of American Minimal Art is based on Walther’s interest in objects and the spatial or material effects elementary to their perception; however, he never uses industrially manufactured products. On the contrary, he places human scale and the human being at the centre of his work.
This was followed by the turn to sewing. With the key work “Four Body Shapes” (1963), the body as a sculptural motif finally stands at the centre. Walther developed activation objects made of stuffed natural-coloured nettle. Fabric – until then a for the most part uncommon artistic material – became a driver of innovation. Through amorphous forms, Walther emphasised the fabric’s organic character, which evokes the memory of skin or reveals a close proximity to the human body. He developed from the material a new formative power for the interaction of the interior and the exterior. With the interactive qualities of his works, Walther negotiates the purportedly irreconcilable antipodes of person and object.
With the “First Work Set” (1963–69) comprised of fifty-eight activatable pieces, Walther’s concept of participation experienced its breakthrough and first climax. The pieces no. 30, “Proximity”, and no. 31, “For Two”, are characterised by a strong intimacy as a result of the constant proximity of the vis-à-vis. No. 20, “Gathering”, also creates a relaxed, informal sense of togetherness on a square cloth. Participation, co-determination, self-responsibility and decision-making were topics of social discourse at that time. Parallel to this, Walther initiated unusual interpersonal situations. He presented the “First Work Set” in 1969/70 – only two years after graduating from the Düsseldorf Academy of Art – on the occasion of the major exhibition “Spaces”, organised by Jennifer Licht at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, in which Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Larry Bell and Michael Asher also participated.
Walther met Andy Warhol in New York on several occasions; his fellow students Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke also dealt with the increasingly commercially orientated society in their panel paintings. Walther himself, however, never turned to representational imagery. The intensive primary colours of Pop Art, however, continue to determine his work to this day. His textile materials became increasingly colourful and served the development of the most diverse groups of works throughout his entire oeuvre. In the hitherto little-noticed polychrome “Wall Formations” of the 1980s, Walther achieved an unparalleled interweaving of painting, sculpture and architecture, which continued from the “Action Paths” and the “Configurations” via the “New Alphabet” into the 1990s to the 2000s. Their activation opened up a wide range of possibilities. The opposites of static and transitory, material and immaterial, isolated and connected, subject and object continue to preoccupy him to this day.
The different lines of development within the oeuvre are comprehensively presented at the Haus der Kunst. The focus here is laid on the core of Walther’s practice – the linking of media. “With his understanding of the body as a component of the work, Walther challenges traditional pictorial logic. He creates counter-images to the image”, explains Jana Baumann, curator of the exhibition, “and has also become a point of reference for the youngest generation of artists.”
In the large hall of the exhibition, daily work activations will take place in cooperation with the Munich initiative TanzQuelle. Key works in the presentation come from lenders such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the MAMCO, Geneva; in addition, there is an important group of works from the artist’s own collection and that of his foundation.
The exhibition has been developed in collaboration with the Franz Erhard Walther Foundation.
