Franz Erhard Walther: GELB YELLOW JAUNE

The focus of this exhibition is directed to the reconstruction of the solo exhibition GELB YELLOW JAUNE, which Franz Erhard Walther devised for 1965 but never realized.

His plan was to show eight yellow works of his in eight rooms at the former Galerie Junge Kunst Fulda: six action pieces, including variations on elements in the First Work Set, and two large, site-specific works that anticipated aspects of his later room-based pieces of the 1970s.

While the uniform color of the works, as a homage to Yves Klein, can clearly be seen as a reference to the contemporary art of the day, the radical nature of the project lies in the works’ embrace of action and space.

The exhibition, conceived with pieces from 1963/64, illustrates a moment in Walther's artistic development when he grappled with the most important decisions in the entire history of his artistic career. The knowledge that by adopting the technique of sewing for his work in March 1963, he had arrived at a completely new approach, together with the idea that viewers should perform actions, engendered numerous unresolved questions and debates in the surrounding art scene while he was studying in Düsseldorf and the Rhineland.

In his diary entries from this period, some of which can be discovered at the VILLA, it becomes clear how challenging it was to define the central ideas of his work without endangering the radical nature of his approach by introducing variations on an idea, or unnecessary elements, or by including aspects of the contemporary approaches that surrounded him.

For a long time the reception of Franz Erhard Walther’s work in the years 1964/65 failed to grasp its fragility. The focus on the First Work Set and the stringency of the 58 objects, which developed from individual sculptural forms into instruments to be activated, and consequently became a fundamental element in the history of 20th-century art, overshadowed the profound questions raised in the early years of their creation.

In those years it was—artistically speaking—a matter of survival and the fact that scarcely anyone responded to the objects with understanding must have been bewildering for someone in the Rhineland in the mid-1960s – at a time when it was the European center of the avant-garde.

1964/65 also acted as the nucleus of a lifelong collaboration between Franz Erhard and Johanna Walther. In their apartment at Talstraße 69 in Düsseldorf, they defined the structural division of labor between the artistic aspect and physical production, which was to be maintained for the following half a century. They agreed on their focus and the seriousness of their intent, and Johanna Walther made a conscious decision to invest her technical skills and professional possibilities in Franz Erhard Walther's artistic enterprise, which she found more exciting than all the other alternatives that were open to her.

In two film interviews, Johanna and Franz Erhard Walther reflect on the situation back then.

In order to place the exhibition GELB YELLOW JAUNE in the context of the avant-garde projects and actions of that time, the elaborate reconstruction is accompanied by a comprehensive overview of influential exhibitions from those years in Aachen, Düsseldorf, Krefeld, Cologne and beyond.

The exhibition was curated by Susanne Walther.