Galerie Jocelyn Wolff is pleased to inaugurate its new space in Paris with an exhibition by the German artist Franz Erhard Walther.

Franz Erhard Walther (Fulda, 1939), winner of the Venice Biennial Golden Lion in 2017, is an artist interested in language, color, volume and the power of imagination. After studying at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, with Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, he was soon interested in the use of textile as a material that combines both flatness and fluidity. For this exhibition, Susanne Walther - head of Franz Erhard Walther Foundation - selected a combination of works (sculptures and drawings) dated from the early 70s to today.

One of the most important work groups of Walther’s oeuvre, the Wall formations – a series which Walther worked on throughout the 70s and 80s - will be presented through three fabric pieces which crystalize the main thematics of this series in specific and unique ways.

Für körper (For bodies), 1988, is a late work from the Wall Formation series which integrates elements that structure space geometrically (recalling an earlier family of works from the 70s), creating spaces that are activatable by the bodies which occupy it.

Ergänzen und brechen zugleich (To complement and break at the same time), 1985, is a sculpture floating on the wall implicating the observer in a playful variation of colored fabric segments. The work is composed of two sets of seven dyed cotton fabric squared panels – half brick tone and half green – that can be arranged into a grid of boxes, composing a full, homogenous, image (a volumetric parallelepiped all brick tone colored) or into a formation which breaks this homogeneity through the alternation of colors.

Schwarz-Gelb, fünf Stellen (Black-yellow, five positions), 1980, is an early Wall Formation piece that plays - as in the case of the two previously described works - with the ideas of relation to the body, activation and color variation. Though, because of the special geometry of the forms, the flatness of the surfaces, and the presence of a large canvas on the background, this work, more so than the others, represents a surface of projection involving the observer’s gaze and imagination in creating their own combination of relationships between volumes and shapes.

A set of 76 work drawings dated 1972 will be also presented for the first time to the public. As in the more known series of the Werkzeichnungen (Work drawings) 1963- 1974, each of these drawings is related and represents the graphic translation of Walther’s thinking upon one of the 58 single sculptural elements composing the iconic Erste werksatz (1963-1969), the “first work set” of cotton fabric sculptures whose final form is defined through its deployment in the space operated by one or more activators. This 76-element series represents a diversion (again a unicum) within the Werkzeichungen series, first of all because of its homogeneity in terms of aesthetics, material used (coffee, tea, graphite) but also, and foremost, because of the time of their production.

The drawings presented were all created in the year 1972 - during a very short time span at the end of the entire series’ production frame – and were made in the stream of retrospective thinking of his past production.

The exhibition will be completed with a series of several Probenähungen (Trial sewing), pieces recently produced using sets of colored and monochrome fabric tubes put together in relation to the proportions of hands, arms and fingers. These pieces assemble an inventory of the most typical colors and forms synthetizing the entanglement and the overlapping between bi-dimensionality and volume, image and sculpture, observation and action which have animated Walther’s practice since the beginning of his artistic career.

(Text by Martina Panelli)