Franz Erhard Walther
L’exposition de Franz Erhard Walther offre un panorama approfondi de l’oeuvre pionnière de cet influent artiste allemand qui se situe à la croisée de la sculpture minimaliste, l’art conceptuel, la peinture abstraite, et la performance, et qui soulève parallèlement des questions fondamentales sur la conception conventionnelle de l’oeuvre d’art en tant qu’«objet» immuable, intrinsèquement lié au socle ou aux cimaises. Réunissant des oeuvres essentielles réalisées entre les années 50 et aujourd’hui, l’exposition se focalise sur la capacité de Walther à transformer la notion d’objet et de perception, et ce, à travers le dessin, la peinture, la sculpture de tissus, des formes participatives, et des oeuvres s’appuyant sur le langage, la documentation photographique et le matériau d’archives.
Having participated in Harald Szeemann’s legendary When Attitudes Become Form (1969) and dOCUMENTA V (1972) as well as the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark Spaces (1970), Walther’s remarkable coupling of elementary forms with conceptual ideas and a radical rethinking of the relationship between sculpture and action, so influential to the contemporary practices of young artists today, deserves renewed attention. With his novel use of fabric forms, which he developed while in art school in the early 1960s, the artist’s aesthetics of actionincites visitors to engage with both sculpture and the institution in challenging ways.
The show at WIELS, the first for the artist in Belgium and one of the larger of his solo exhibitions to date, will underscore the essential tension provoked by Walther’s work and the ways it thinks about what and artwork can do, or what can be done with it as opposed to how merely it appears or what it is. The show will trace this tension via a sweeping panorama of the artist’s production, including more than one hundred works, while also drawing attention to the artist’s relationship to documentation, both photographic and drawn, and his fundamental conception of the exhibition itself as a platform for social action. It will include numerous objects to be manipulated in the exhibition and will be animated by several workshops and work demonstrations led by the artist.
Work demonstrations and public programs complementing the exhibition are realized in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Brüssel.
Franz Erhard Walther
21.02 - 11.05.2014
Opening: 20.02.2014, 18:30
With a work demonstration by the artist at 19:00
Curator: Elena Filipovic
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Work demonstration by Franz Erhard Walther for children
Work demonstration by artist Franz Erhard Walther
WIELS is looking for participants in 'work demonstrations' during the Franz Erhard Walther exhibition
