IMAGE ENGINE Influences 1957 – 1960Franz Erhard WaltherOctober 13, 2024 – March 9, 2025
Every work of art is preceded by a time in which the surrounding influences, the visual and intellectual impressions provide the material basis of an artistic cosmos that initially goes without name.
The exhibition IMAGE ENGINE brings together various aspects that were of importance to Franz Erhard Walther in the decisive years between 1957 and 1960, and that became the material for developing an oeuvre that, a few years later, gained a definition that remains valid to this day.
Exemplary works by Franz Erhard Walther are being shown here alongside contemporary documents whose traces can first be discerned in reworked manifestations and only at a later date. Even if these impressions are inextricably linked to their respective time and place, the unique intrinsic quality that is essential to define a work was shaped by Walther’s specific interests and preferences, together with the connections between the various images that only can be grasped in retrospect.
The key characteristics derive from the choice of influences and the significance assigned to them. Only by concentrating on concrete questions and avoiding getting lost in the wealth of impressions do the outlines of a future work emerge from all that has been seen and taken in.
It is not a matter here of deciphering the phenomenon of creating a body of work. Rather, the exhibition focuses on the fact – valid for all time – that a heterogeneous range of influences from the period in question formed the basis for defining the work, and which only through the filter of individual selection, the perception of certain structures, and the concentration on a central question, created something specifically its own from the material of that time.
The exhibition includes documentation from documenta II, which was mounted in Kassel in 1959; works created in connection with Walther’s travels to Spain, Greece and Turkey; films and experimental films that were shown in Fulda cinemas in the latter half of the 1950s; advertising films made by Hans Fischerkoesen; material on the influence of the American presence in Fulda; examples of the literature and philosophy that Walther digested in those years; and a selection of photographs by Hubert Weber from the Fulda City Archive, in which the origins of later manifestations of his work can be discerned, as well as the memories of the events of those years recorded in Walther’s biographical cycle of drawings Dust of Stars (2007 – 2009).
The specially designed film room on the upper floor presents an extensive interview with Franz Erhard Walther alternating with film screenings.
The exhibition was curated by Susanne Walther, Franz Erhard Walther Foundation.