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august 03, 2018 - Mocak Museum

To the Absolute through the Abstract, by Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart

To the Absolute through the Abstract


Artist: Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart

Co-organiser: Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation, Switzerland

Curator: Delfina Jałowik

Co-operation: Arta Valstar-Verhoff

Co-ordinator: Mateusz Grymek

Opening: 28 June 2018

Running: 29 June – 23 September 2018

Venue: Alfa Gallery, level -1



Born in 1899, from the very beginning of the artistic career on which he had embarked in the mid-1920s, the German artist #friedrichvordembergegildewart consistently pursued the path of abstraction, regardless of the medium in which he was operating at any given time. He studied architecture, interior design and sculpture in Hanover; in the history of art he is mainly regarded as a painter. Apart from these four specialisms, he also undertook graphic design projects and typographic commissions and was a lecturer as well as the author of poetic texts and essays on art.

Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart quickly gained recognition and, as a representative of the international avant-garde, he belonged to many artistic groups, including De Stijl, Der Sturm, die abstrakten hannover and abstraction-création. The rise of National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s forced him to emigrate from the country of his birth. His wife, Ilse Leda, was Jewish, and Vordemberge-Gildewart’s works, which did not abide by the prevailing canon, were classified as ‘degenerate art’. The artist did not return to Germany until 1954 when he was appointed to a post at the Ulm School of Design, and he lived in the city until his death in 1962.

Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart created 222 canvasses, numbered chronologically. He first called them ‘constructions’, in reference to architecture and later ‘compositions’, an evocation of music. In these works he aims to create a universal structure by the smallest possible number of means.

Today, the works of #friedrichvordembergegildewart can be found in the most important museum collections throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. In the Museum in Wiesbaden there is an archive devoted to the artist and it is there that the largest institutional collection of Vordemberge-Gildewart’s works can be found. At the exhibition we present over 20 works from the collections of the museums in Osnabrück and Wiesbaden, as well as art galleries in Berlin and London and private collections.

The exhibition is accompanied by a sizeable publication, which comprises reproductions of the artist’s works, his life-and-artistic timeline, a selection of his writings (translated for the first time into Polish and English) and an essay by Arta Valstar-Verhoff, a Bonn art historian, who has specialised in Vordemberge-Gildewart since the mid-1980s, as well as conversations with August Vordemberge, the artist’s nephew and last surviving relative, and Dietrich Helms, a professor emeritus of art from Hamburg, who was the first to undertake comprehensive research of the artist’s legacy.