Franz Erhard Walther (1939)
Germany
Biography :
"Born in 1930 in Fulda (Germany)
Lives and works IN FULDA
The work of Franz Erhard Walther has been exhibited at prestigious exhibitions around the world, such as at MoMA in 1969 and several times in Kassel during Documenta (1972, 1977, 1982 and 1987). In 2009, Franz Erhard Walther presented Sternenstaub (“Stardust”) at the Galerie Jocelyn Wolff in Paris, a set of drawings in the form of a novel where, through more than seven hundred illustrations, he undertook to retrace his life since 1942 until 1973, when the entire basis of his work was already established.
In 2010, the Mamco in Geneva dedicated a retrospective to the artist, Franz Erhard Walther: On the origin of sculpture, 1958-2009.
In 2017, Franz Erhard Walther was the winning artist of the Golden Lion at the 57th Venice Biennale.
It was in 1957, while he was still a student at the Offenbach School of Applied Arts, that he created the Wortbilder, “word drawings” which were part of a large fabric alphabet. He then took courses at the Frankfurt School of Fine Arts where he produced works on paper borrowing from folding and collage as well as his Material Bilde, paintings covered with reliefs of recovered and painted fabrics. These led to him being expelled from his school by decision of his teacher. He then enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf in 1962, sharing the classes of the artist Karl Otto Götz with Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. It was here, in 1963, that he conceived action as a “form of the work” (werform) and began his series of 1. Werksatz (1963-1969). The artist affirms the idea, which will henceforth guide his work, that the work can only take its true form in its interaction with the spectator. He therefore chooses to name his sculptures “objects” (vests, carpets and bands, made of fabric), both to signify their quality of work and their instrumental character. Heir to Informal Art, Walther chose to radically extend its principles, by inviting the public to grasp the work in order to materialize it. In the 1970s and 1980s he developed the Wandformation, works necessarily hung or leaned against the wall. Always made of fabric with a structure composed of wooden sticks, his works are for him ideas that should be materialized or not, existing on the picture rails like paintings or like sculptures when they are activated by spectators, thus becoming the sculpture itself.
Franz Erhard Walther is one of the major figures of post-minimalism, who, like the artist Lygia Clark, has developed a work where the process, the temporal dimension and the relationship with the spectator constitute the founding principles."
(Source, website, Contemporary Art Institute of Villeurbanne)