Lore Bert

Lore Bert, born on 2 July 1936 in Gießen, studied painting from 1953 to 1957 in Darmstadt and Berlin at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, where sculptor Hans Uhlmann inspired her lifelong fascination with spatial form.

For over four decades, her artistic practice has been characterised by the use of fine Asian papers from Japan, Nepal, Korea, and China, often employed in ways that introduce a spatial dimension. Since the early 1980s, her collages, objects, transparencies, sculptures, installations, and entire paper environments have reflected her deep interest in material, form, and space.

Following her exhibitions in Cairo in 1996, papyrus and 23-carat gold leaf entered her material vocabulary, and from the mid-1990s, light became an integral part of her work. She began creating environments with neon text and tubes, later incorporating numerals and spheres of light into full luminous spaces.

Her visual language draws on constructive forms, geometry, architectural elements, ornaments, numbers, and letters, while her intellectual framework embraces science, philosophy, poetry, and mathematics.

Since her first international exhibition in Montreal (1985), Lore Bert has exhibited worldwide — over 300 exhibitions in 28 countries. She has realised more than 125 large-scale environments in museums and public institutions across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas.

Bert has represented Germany at several biennales and was honoured as Guest Artist at the Sharjah Biennale (1999)and the Izmir Biennale (2011). Her collateral event at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) at Museo Correr attracted over 105,000 visitors and was ranked among Italy’s top ten cultural events of that summer.

In 2017 she received the Medal of the City of Lublin (Poland) for outstanding artistic achievement, and in 2019 she presented Illumination – Ways to Eureka at the Church of San Samuele in Venice, featuring a towering dichroic glass column rising from a shimmering sea of folded paper.

Lore Bert lives and works in Mainz and Venice.