Franz Erhard Walther: Attempt to be a Sculpture

Year 1958. A young man is sitting before a sheet of canvas, cross-legged and barefoot, within close reach of a metal bowl containing a mixture of baking powder, water and milk. He spits out the mixture while a friend of his captures his ephemeral gestures with a camera. 19-year-old Franz Erhard Walther, growing up in Fulda (Germany), breaks from his family’s bakery business by expelling the ingredients involved in the making of bread. At the same time, with this action-work titled Attempt to be a Sculpture, he steps into the territory of art by distancing himself from artistic conventions. 

The exhibition Attempt to be a Sculpture draws from the eponymous work that lays the foundation for Walther’s ongoing commitment to reformulating sculpture as an open process and action, as well as shaping new modes of bodily presence in time and space. The works presented in the 4th and 3rd-floor galleries highlight the conceptual turning points of the artist’s oeuvre, spanning more than six decades, through a non-chronological trajectory. 

Since his early processual works in the 1960s, Walther has forged a new concept of work that turns the living body into a material, while allowing the viewer to become an “actor” engaged in the realisation of the work through their imagination or bodily action. Most of Walther’s sculptural works can be experienced either in their “storage form” (Lagerform) – the state in which objects are folded and stored – or in their “action form” (Handlungsform) when they are activated by their “users”.

Conceived around concepts pivotal to Walther’s practice, the exhibition Attempt to be a Sculpture builds a dialogue between his early paper works such as Outline Drawings and Word Images, pillow shapes that use air as material, Work Drawings, Handpieces from the 1960s, and his later groups of works, including his Layer Drawings, Action Paths and Wall Formations, which fuse architecture and human proportions. It also features an extensive selection from his autobiographical work Dust of Stars, composed of drawings and handwritten texts that unfold memories and reflections across time and space. The iconic First Work Set, presented for the first time in its entirety in 1969 at MoMA in New York, introduces the crucial role of cloth, a malleable and wearable material, in the artist’s endeavour to challenge the objecthood of art and to shift the production of meaning from the object to the body in action. Coming down from its pedestal and conversing with architecture, sculpture departs from its customary stiffness and inertia to join the reality of human life. Never given / never finished, it comes to us anew, at various speeds, in the form of a collective endeavour that may (or may not) actualise countless possible shapes and states of being.

The activation area on the third floor offers visitors the opportunity to engage with and activate 12 different exhibition copies of the First Work Set on designated days and hours.