Franz Erhard Walther Leere Flchen/Empty Surfaces 1961-1962

Franz Erhard Walther, who was honored with a Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, took the idea of what an image is supposed to be and turned that concept upside down. His statement "the images are in your head" can be taken as programmatic for these Leeren Flchen. In these works, the image is no longer just material matter. Instead, the work demands an active viewer who adds to it the element of his or her own imagination. The viewer therefore becomes an integral component of the work; the images only become complete in the mind of the viewer. In an extraordinary stroke of serendipity for the field of art history, the works that are reproduced in this catalogue for the first time had been considered lost, but now have resurfaced after several decades. Although they were misunderstood and rejected at the time of their production, these early works helped initiate a paradigm shift that later would culminate in his famous Werksatz, the work with which Franz Erhard Walther became known internationally when it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1969.