Franz Erhard Walther

Wortfeld, 2005

In about 1960, Franz Erhard Walther developed a substantially new work concept that turns his viewers into acting, reflecting accomplices in creating the work. His ‘workpieces’, mostly sewn in cotton, make it possible to experience abstract sculptural concepts like dimension, energy, time, space, weight, material process as aspects of the sculpture and the image. Walther has created a so-called Wortfeld for the large entrance wall of the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. The concepts chosen for it are not descriptive, but have haloes of meaning addressing artistic, cultural and scientific-technical spheres. But pictorial and sculptural qualities are central. The rhythm it creates by the word objects relates to the architecture. One word in each case was screen-printed on to the insides of perspex boxes open at the back and sides. The artist developed the type, each word is individually constructed like ›linguistic architecture‹, down to the individual ›space placings‹, in other words spaces between the letters which are fixed each time. The box shapes are so arranged that they make the wall into a three-dimensional image. The concepts connect together in a whole variety of ways as the eye wanders around in the Wortfeld at will. Seeing and reading as a positive act. Wall and space become one single place.