ART CITIES:Mexico City-Franz Erhard Walther
The work of Franz Erhard Walther spans a period from the late 1950s to the present day. It anticipates many issues that came to the fore in later art history, such as the condition of the artistic object (sculpture, its materials, techniques and uses) and the nature of the viewer as receiver and participant.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Casa Luis Barragán & Fundación Jumex Archive
The work of Franz Erhard Walther is on presentation in Mexico with two parallel exhibitions, one at the Casa Estudio Luis Barragán and the other at the Museo Jumex. Throughout his artistic career, Franz Erhard Walther has explored topics related to the body, sculpture, architecture, and the concept of action. Most of his work takes place in the intersection between different techniques and artistic languages, emphasizing the mental and poetic associations that arise at the moment when the body of the viewer experiences and thus brings a work of art into completion. Walther understands the artwork as an act of communication, a “Sculptural action in space”. As such, time, body, language and memory become the building blocks of his sculptural actions. The exhibition “Determinations of Proportion” in Casa Barragán brings together several works created by the artist from the 1960s until today. The exhibition showcases works from Walther’s iconic series “First Work Set” (1963-69), a selection of early drawings installed in the Barragán Studio and a new site-specific drawing created by Walther, especially for the house. In the context of Casa Barragán, the curatorial approach proposes a dialogue with the legacy of Luis Barragán by pointing out the affective and emotional dimension of his architecture, concepts addressed by Walther in his own practice through the haptic quality of his pieces, as well as in the unpredictability of the artwork’s activations by spectators. These qualities evoke a spatial experimentation that is central to both Walther and Barragán’s practices. The exhibition “Objects, to use. Instruments for processes” at the Museo Jumex presents a significant selection from his major bodies of work, exploring dominant themes in Walther’s practice; from the idea of action as a central working concept to the relationality between object, spectator and space that is the hallmark of his production. At the center of the exhibition is Walther’s seminal “First Work Set” (1963-69), which can be considered the conceptual, operative and material matrix from which his subsequent production unfolds. Possibly one of the most radical works produced in the 1960s, the “First Work Set” destabilized traditional notions of sculpture, redefined the object as well as its relation to the gallery space and the spectator, and like many practices of the 1960s, also proposed linguistic and discursive functions for photography. Different works in the exhibition make manifest the ideas at the core of his practice as an artist, and underscore his various interests in language, communication, process, space, scale, and the active role of the spectator. Extending across different media and supports-drawing, collage, sewn objects, video, and photographs–Walther’s production exemplifies the crossovers between these mediums that took place in the art of the 1960s.
Info: “Determinations of Proportion”, Curator: Daniel Garza Usabiaga, Estancia Femsa -Casa Luis Barragán, Col. Ampliación Daniel Garza, General Francisco Ramírez 12-14, Mexico City, Duration: 12/5-30/9/18, Days & Hours: By appointment only, Mon-Fri 10:00-15:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-13:00, http://estanciafemsa.mx and “Objects, to use. Instruments for processes”, Curator: Julieta González, Assistant Curator: María Emilia Fernández, Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303, Colonia Granada, Mexico City, Duration: 12/5-30/9/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-20:00, www.fundacionjumex.org
