ISTANBUL .- Arter’s 2025 exhibition programme continues with Franz Erhard Walther’s solo exhibition titled Attempt to be a Sculpture. Marking the artist’s first solo presentation in Türkiye on that scale, the exhibition curated by Selen Ansen draws from the eponymous work that lays the foundation for Walther’s ongoing commitment to reformulating sculpture as an open process and action, as well as shaping new modes of bodily presence in time and space. The exhibition will be on view at Arter’s Gallery 4 and 3 until 5 October 2025.
Discover the Pioneers of Participatory Art: Order 'Action as Sculpture' Today. Explore the revolutionary oeuvres of Lygia Clark and Franz Erhard Walther, two artists who redefined the role of the beholder.
Year 1958. A young man is sitting before a sheet of canvas, cross-legged and barefoot, within close reach of a metal bowl containing a mixture of baking powder, water and milk. He spits out the mixture while a friend of his captures his ephemeral gestures with a camera. 19-year-old Franz Erhard Walther, growing up in Fulda (Germany), breaks from his family’s bakery business by expelling the ingredients involved in the making of bread. At the same time, with this action-work titled Attempt to be a Sculpture, he steps into the territory of art by distancing himself from artistic conventions.
The exhibition Attempt to be a Sculpture draws from the eponymous work that lays the foundation for Walther’s ongoing commitment to reformulating sculpture as an open process and action, as well as shaping new modes of bodily presence in time and space. The works presented in the 4th and 3rd-floor galleries highlight the conceptual turning points of the artist’s oeuvre, spanning more than six decades, through a non-chronological trajectory.
Since his early processual works in the 1960s, Walther has forged a new concept of work that turns the living body into a material, while allowing the viewer to become an “actor” engaged in the realisation of the work through their imagination or bodily action. Most of Walther’s sculptural works can be experienced either in their “storage form” (Lagerform) – the state in which objects are folded and stored – or in their “action form” (Handlungsform) when they are activated by their “users”.
Conceived around concepts pivotal to Walther’s practice, the exhibition Attempt to be a Sculpture builds a dialogue between his early paper works such as Outline Drawings and Word Images, pillow shapes that use air as material, Work Drawings, Handpieces from the 1960s, and his later groups of works, including his Layer Drawings, Action Paths and Wall Formations, which fuse architecture and human proportions. It also features an extensive selection from his autobiographical work Dust of Stars, composed of drawings and handwritten texts that unfold memories and reflections across time and space. The iconic First Work Set, presented for the first time in its entirety in 1969 at MoMA in New York, introduces the crucial role of cloth, a malleable and wearable material, in the artist’s endeavour to challenge the objecthood of art and to shift the production of meaning from the object to the body in action. Coming down from its pedestal and conversing with architecture, sculpture departs from its customary stiffness and inertia to join the reality of human life. Never given / never finished, it comes to us anew, at various speeds, in the form of a collective endeavour that may (or may not) actualise countless possible shapes and states of being.
The activation area on the third floor offers visitors the opportunity to engage with and activate 12 different exhibition copies of the First Work Set on designated days and hours.
Ever since Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939, Fulda) embarked on his artistic practice in Fulda in the late 1950s, his work has been marked by a radical openness. This openness initially focused on material processes and expanded to include the spectator as an active participant in the work’s realisation. The trajectory of Walther’s articulation of his participatory concept, which underwent a radical change in 1963 with the production of the first pieces of the First Work Set, conveys as a dynamic process that underscores the simultaneity of contrasting approaches and the anticipatory theoretical conception of works that only later came to be materialised. Franz Erhard Walther’s work consists of the possibillites of fluid configurations of bodies with space and architecture and permutations of language, forms and methods.
Walther is the recipient of the Golden Lion for the best artist at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The artist’s work has been exhibited in the form of solo presentations at The Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA, 1970, with Michael Asher, Larry Bell, Dan Flaving, Robert Morris, Pulsa Group), Museum Ludwig (Köln, Germany, 1977), Nationalgalerie Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Berlin, Germany, 1981), Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 1984), Atatürk Cultural Centre Art Gallery (Istanbul, Türkiye, 1993), State Museum of Painting and Sculpture (Ankara, Türkiye, 1993), MAMCO, Musée d'art moderne et contemporain (Geneva, Switzerland, 2010), Dia Art Foundation (Beacon, USA, 2010-2012), WIELS Contemporary Art Centre (Brussels, Belgium, 2014), CAPC Bordeaux (Bordeaux, France, 2014), MUDAM (Luxembourg, 2015), Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, USA, 2015), The Power Plant (Toronto, Canada, 2016), Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain, 2017), Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo and Casa Barragán (Mexico City, Mexico, 2018), Haus der Kunst (Munich, Germany, 2020), and Bundeskunsthalle (Bonn, Germany, 2024).
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