FRANKFURT.- The Städel Museum continues the series “In the Städel Garden” with an extraordinary presentation dedicated to Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939). The artist’s Walking Pedestals and Places to Stand are on display on the museum’s freely accessible greens from 17 September to 23 November 2014. The internationally much-noticed artist began developing this group of works for outdoors, which made him a key figure of Minimal and Performance Art, in the early 1970s. With their reduced forms, the minimalist ground elements formed of steel invite the viewer to a walk-on tour of his work. Pacing off the plinths, the visitor turns into the material of the sculptural process. Franz Erhard Walther’s Walking Pedestals and Places to Stand in the front and back garden areas offer surprising lines of sight and new perspectives of the museum and its environs.

Born in Fulda in 1939, Franz Erhard Walther enrolled at the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 1959. In 1962, he changed to the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, where he studied with Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke in Karl Otto Götz’s class. Even then, Walther’s interest focused on design processes resulting from the context of a specific materiality. He was fascinated with paper, for example, which took on different forms when brought into contact with certain liquids. He came to experiment with textiles and made objects from nettle cloth aimed at involving the viewer in an interactive manner by their use. It was under these conditions that he produced his 1. Werksatz (First Work Series, 1963–1969), which comprises fifty-eight objects and was already presented in the first year of the artist’s stay in the USA from 1967 to 1971 in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Through Walther’s art, the traditional understanding of sculpture underwent a radical change in the 1960s. The artist regards the process, seeing, movement, and experience as the components constituting a work. Because of this attitude, Walther, who held a professorship at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg between 1971 and 2005, influenced an entire generation of artists: from Rebecca Horn and Martin Kippenberger to Santiago Serra and Jonathan Meese, which are all represented in the collection of the Städel Museum.

Franz Erhard Walther’s group of works Walking Pedestals and Places to Stand is primarily characterized by the reduced and minimalist solutions it offers. The so-called Walking Pedestals present themselves as steel sheets and tracks with unilaterally elevated margins to be found on the ground of the Städel Garden premises; slightly raised square areas, the Places to Stand, complement them. The workpieces depend on being paced off so to actually become plinths. Thus, participants may regard themselves as part of the sculpture. In addition, the process of striding establishes a relationship with the environs, as standing and lingering in a place integrates the dimension of time into the work. Striding or standing, visitors are offered unusual perspectives and surprising associations in the art-informed surroundings of the museum and the Städelschule with this presentation on the Städel’s outside premises. Walther’s Walking Pedestals and Places to Stand not only relate to their real environs, but also foster forms of interaction between the visitors. Although body, space, and time are clearly essential elements of classical sculpture, Walther uses these elements to create a completely new conceptual sculptural mode of expression.

The exhibition highlights both the processual and social dimension of Walther’s works and their extended “sculptural quality.” Understanding the body as part of the artistic design led to a lasting extension of the concept of the work in Walther’s art. Franz Erhard Walther not only realized these ideas in his production quite early on but combined them with fundamental thoughts of Minimal Art and Performance Art emerging in the United States at that time.

As part of the new presentation of its collection of sculptures in the Städel Garden, the Städel Museum has presented a number of performative works and installations on the freely accessible premises around the museum building in the series “In the Städel Garden” since 2013. The beginning was made in April 2013 with the lavish production of the performance Watering Hole by Adrian Williams, who lives in Frankfurt. It was followed by an exhibition of Adolf Luther’s works as another temporary presentation in June 2013. In 2014, the series was continued with Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures and Alan B. Brock-Richmond and Bernhard Schreiner’s The Encryption Garden – A Sound Installation in the Städel Garden .