Franz Erhard Walther’s outdoor exhibition at Arter, Istanbul.
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. - Arter
Exhibition views, Arter, 2025
Curator : Selen Ansen
Photos : Kayhan Kaygusuz
