• 

Franz Erhard Walther

Sternenstaub. Ein gezeichneter Roman

Sketched commentaries on the art history of late modernism

“Dust of Stars. A Drawn Novel” is a monumental cycle of 524 sheets filled with pencil drawings and inscribed by hand. Between 2007 and 2009, Franz Erhard Walther (b. Fulda 1939; lives and works in Fulda) created this epic historical narrative, which contributes his commentary on the art of late modernity. Working from memory with the help of diary entries and photographs, he spreads out a tableau of his time organized by his own life that begins in 1942, during World War II, and ends in 1973, when the artist’s reductive works with their emphasis on materials and processes had gained recognition. He intertwines political, social, and especially cultural events with his private history and the steps of his career as an artist. Events from his childhood and youth in Fulda, notes on his time at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, where Walther studied with Gerhard Richter and Jörg Immendorff under Karl Otto Götz, encounters with Mark Rothko, Dick Higgins, and Barnett Newman in late-1960s New York, as well as moments from Walther’s time as a teacher at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg bring the history of art after 1945 to life.

With an essay by Sylvia Martin, deputy director, Kunstmuseen Krefeld.