On the Origin of Sculpture, 1958-2009

until sunday may 02 2010
Mamco
Geneva
T : +41 22 320 61 22
10, rue des Vieux-Grenadiers
CH-1205 Geneva
Switzerland

Press Attached
Clarisse Jouen
T : +41 22 320 61 22
c.jaouen@mamco.ch
mamco.ch

A Major Retrospective of Franz Erhard Walther's work at Mamco. From 17 February to 2 May, Mamco will be hosting the most important retrospective devoted to Franz Erhard Walther (1937, Fulda, Germany), one of the artists associated with the museum since its founding. Indeed, Mamco has followed his work for many years.

De l’origine de la sculpture, 1958-2009 (On the Origin of Sculpture, 1958-2009) will be the
largest show the artist has put together to date, including anything he has done in Germany, where his output has featured in numerous exhibitions and publications. Spread out over some thirty galleries on the museum’s four floors, this show brings together several hundred pieces that go back over a half century of making art.

As in other Mamco retrospectives (Martin Kippenberger, Claudio Parmiggiani, Siah Armajani), De l’origine de la sculpture, 1958-2009 consecrates an artist whose work has marked the history of the venue, both with an initial show devoted to Walther in 1998 and, since the museum’s opening, the permanent presentation of Werklager, a gallery featuring a large collection of works produced between 1961 and 1972 that includes one of his major pieces, 1. Werksatz (1963-1968).

A crucial artist of the avant-garde in the 1960s.
Franz Erhard Walther has left a profound and lasting mark on the German art scene by broadening the field of art and proposing new types of work, notably in terms of the role of the viewer as an integral part of a piece. Walther trained at the Offenbach School of Applied Arts and at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie. The artist initially focused on drawing (Wortbilder) before shifting his work towards the object and the new materials that were finding their way into the realm of sculpture such as the body, action, time and space. The early 1960s were a turning point in his output when he declared that the work of art is created in the process of action, the artist’s or the viewer’s. “Instead of a material object, be it an image or a sculpture, I proclaimed that the body’s gestures could have the character of a work of art.”
Walther creates cloth sculpture-objects displayed in a variety of ways, spread out in space,
folded, filled out by a human body or left as they are, in the state of an object of pure
contemplation. Hybrid works of art that verge on painting and sculpture, these pieces invite
the viewers to experience their relationship to time and space. Yet whatever the materials
or techniques used by the artist—he continues to turn out drawings notably—his work throughout his career has always come down to the importance he places in language, memory and history.