Franz Erhard Walther: Shifting Perspectives

Franz Erhard Walther‘s solo show “Shifting Perspectives” runs at Haus der Kunst, Munich, from March 6 to August 2, 2020. Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939 in Fulda) was a key figure in the conceptual departure from the image in the postwar European avant-garde, and a pioneer of an open concept of the work. Through the inclusion of the audience as an actor as well as the use of elements like place, time, space, body, and language, Walther brought about a radical expansion and combination of artistic means aimed at revising the narrative strategies of modernism.
The artist’s work is characterized by an emphasis on experimentation, lending an almost inexhaustible variety of pictorial concepts and ideas to the procedural form. Walther questioned materiality with processes involving coffee, vegetable oil or soy sauce on paper as an image carrier, enacting the transformation of the picture into an object.
The retrospective at Haus der Kunst traces the uninterrupted influence of Walther’s work on the art scene through today, with more than 250 works from his central creative periods and most important bodies of work. The different lines of development in Walther’s oeuvre are comprehensively presented with work activations, so that an amplified reading of his artistic work becomes possible.