Dedicated To The Moon, The Drawings of Franz Erhard WaltherFranz Erhard WaltherSeptember 27, 2026 – May 05, 2027
Curated by Susanne Walther.
There has not been a solo exhibition of Franz Erhard Walther's drawings in the German speaking area since 1999. Based on the unique collection of the Franz Erhard Walther Foundation, the VILLA will present this complex ensemble from 27 September 2026 onwards in the exhibition DEDICATED TO THE MOON.
With hundreds of drawings, including works from the studio that have never before been exhibited, visitors will have the opportunity to discover this extraordinary body of work.
For seventy years, drawing has been both the starting point and the place where Franz Erhard Walther realises and develops his radical artistic vision. This multi-layered world of drawing is not merely a companion to the evolution of his work, but stands at its very centre. This is where the ideas originate and where they are transformed into concrete designs for works. However, drawings also serve as levels of reflection on the three-dimensional objects, their activation and reception.
The exhibition DEDICATED TO THE MOON demonstrates that Walther’s drawings are not only on a par with his significant sculptural work, but also offer an intimate insight into the artistic process.
Across eight rooms on two levels, the various approaches to drawing are presented in an elaborate exhibition that is deliberately not chronological, but organised according to questions and topics.
Whilst the sculptural works since 1963 were realised almost exclusively by Johanna Walther and other workshop collaborators and in steel plants, drawing remained Walther’s most personal domain. Here, visitors can observe and understand from up close how the designs for the various forms of work keep emerging and how the processes of creating the works are reflected; you can keep track of how the concept takes shape in the drawings and how these serve as a crucial tool for structuring the creative processes. Equally, it is in the drawn works that layers of memory are filtered and reassembled into something new – including the artist’s perspective on past exhibitions and their transformation into a unique form of documentation, the so-called Plan Drawings.
It is the imperative arising from the very concept of the artwork – the need to continually re-examine the question of a work’s essence and form of manifestation, and to find ever-changing answers to it – that is presented in the drawings in a wide variety of forms. From the string works of the first half of the 1960s, which structure real space on a large scale, through the Work Drawings (1963–74), which serve as evidence of the inner processes triggered by the actions, to the visual power of the Layer Drawings of the late 1970s or the open compositions of the works on paper, which have been produced in increasing numbers since 2000, one of the most multi-layered bodies of drawings of our time unfolds.