Karl-Heinz Adler
Raum und Ordnung
21 November 2024 – 18 January 2025
Flyer for the exhibition in German
In 2016, Hans Ulrich Obrist, one of the most important curators, art historians and scholars of our time, and the conceptual artist, painter and graphic designer Karl-Heinz Adler conducted an in-depth interview. Adler's work is still relevant today and deserves a closer look. His career, his work and specific examples of his work are discussed below. The conversation is one of the last such comprehensive and in-depth interviews that Karl-Heinz Adler conducted before his death in 2018. Hans Ulrich Obrist met Adler in his studio in Dresden.
Obrist: Did you build this studio yourself ?
Adler: Built it myself, on cooperative soil, as it were. This was a cooperative of artists who wanted to develop something like the Bauhaus.
Obrist: A utopia?
Adler: A great utopia, in fact: trying something like that here in the East. Over the years, things then went more or less well. A number of the artists conformed, but since we were able to react in relative secrecy, we nonetheless managed quite well.
Obrist: And how long have you been here?
Adler: I’ve been part of things here from the very beginning. I was also the executive manager for two years. In East Germany back then, we were trying to shake things up a bit, to make waves. But that naturally wasn’t possible; things never really gained momentum.
[…]
Obrist: And what made you take up art? Did you have an epiphany?
Adler: It’s actually quite simple. At the beginning, I was a very bad student and always rubbed the teachers the wrong way. Played my pranks. […] And then came the search for an occupation. I was supposed to become a metalworker or electrician, not a maker of musical instruments. My father said: “You aren’t allowed to do that!”
I wasn’t able to become a metalworker or electrician, because of my bad school reports, and because I had sweaty hands. “That guy will then end up hanging in the electrical cables, and we don’t want that.” And fourteen days before Easter, before the end of school, I didn’t have a job or an apprenticeship. Then, one day, there was an ad in the Vogtländische Zeitung saying that pattern designer apprentices were still being sought. In Oelsnitz in the Vogtland, with the carpet company Koch & te Kock. And so my father asked me: “Don’t you want to give something like that a try? You’ve always enjoyed drawing.” So, I went there, they gave us something to draw and said: “When you’re finished, come back again in one week.” I did as they asked. They put down their things and said: “Well, we wanted to give you a chance. We thought you did it alone; you can’t simply give it to someone who draws it for you.” That, of course, made me angry and I said: “I did do it myself!”
[…]
All vocational training actually brings great advantages to those who complete it. People have to work with precision, to learn how to organize their day. They have to do the simplest things to bring order to their thoughts and naturally also to their work. And that’s already of tremendous value, since people can always use and apply that skill later on.
[…]
Obrist: When did you create your first abstract work?
Adler: That’s sort of difficult to say. In 1957, when I made my first collages.
Obrist: How did that come about?
Adler: I got a position as an assistant in the architecture department in Dresden, with a Professor Langner, a sculptor. Because he had so many students, he wanted to have someone to help him teach nude drawing and sculpture. It was called architectural sculpture.
[…]
Obrist: Is that when you did your first collages?
Adler: That was when I started trying things out myself, when I created the first things. Not all at once, but peu à peu.
Obrist: And how did you come up with the idea of two colors, two shapes?
Adler: We learned that when designing carpets during our apprenticeship. The important thing was to make do with as few shapes and colors as possible. I probably transferred that to my early collages. The collages are based on two colors, the noncolors black and white, and the first works were done in gray and black. It’s another story again with painting.
[…]
Obrist: Could you explain your working method to us?
Adler: I begin with the format. The format is partitioned on the edges in height and width. One, two, three, four horizontally, one, two, three, four vertically, and the points are then connected. If I want, I apply a gray-white palette in advance and retain the characteristic style. I then take two colors and layer them: one time, two times, three times, four times, five times, six times, seven times. And then work in the opposite direction: one, two, three, four, five. I’ve then achieved my goal: nuancing the color field. The color spaces obtained in this way are divided up according to the rules, based on the network, and then reshaped through my joining the structural components into fascinating, object-like images of organic regularity that differ in shape and color, like we are familiar with in an analogue way from natural phenomena.
Obrist: Dividing up the surface corresponding to the grid and reshaping the parts results in very diverse pictorial forms that are always organic and proportional.
[…]
Obrist: You’ve cited the Polish artist Henryk Berlewi, who’s been forgotten today: “An entirely new design system is being established with the help of mechanization and painterly means of expression. That doesn’t mean that the creative process is automated, but rather that greater freedom is achieved through mechanization.” Could you say something about that freedom through mechanization?
Adler: You have to clarify what can be achieved with very simple means and what you want to achieve, and you have to bring those two things into interplay with one another. It’s like in a family; you’ve brought children into the world.
Obrist: That’s an analogy to life. And when the children leave home, you also aren’t able to control their lives anymore.
Adler: That’s how it is.
Obrist: They then live their own lives. And that’s perhaps also the case with art.
Adler: A bit, perhaps. It depends on how you look at it.
[…]
Obrist: In 1960, you began collaborating with Friedrich Kracht. Did you begin working with him in 1960?
Adler: I worked with him until his death and had a very good working relationship with him.
Obrist: And with him, you then concocted new materials. You invented pneumatic coating techniques. How did that work?
Adler: The goal was to project or spray something onto a wall using air pressure. That was done with a special spray diffuser, with compressed air. The container with the spray mortar was on top. We used it for the colored ceramic granulate.
[…]
Obrist: Besides architecture and work that is practical for society, your work also includes painting, which we haven’t mentioned at all so far. It is […] characterized by layering. You did a lot of layering in your pictures in the nineteen-seventies. The fountains are three-dimensional layerings, but in painting there are two-dimensional layerings.
Adler: Yes, they are often two-dimensional and look three-dimensional, above all as a result of transparency. I also did a lot of layering with glass or films. And finally also with acrylic paint, which gives rise to the depth effect in the painting.
Obrist: You also layered many other things, text, as well. How did the text layerings come about?
Adler: The range of typographic designs on paper is very interesting for designers and artists: They use typesetting to make something of it.
Obrist: It was first newspapers, but then also paper that you layered. That’s interesting.
[…]
Obrist: How did these serial line works come about ? They’re also important.
Adler: I’ve also written various things about the line works myself.
Obrist: Could you tell us how the serial line works were created?
Adler: What I really wanted was to create chasms that push tightly up against each other and widely diverge from each another so as to obtain various depths. That’s the very simple answer. There’s no secret; it’s all quite mundane.
