Hartmut Böhm: or-or

Renate Wiehager (Herausgeber), Christian Ganzenberg (Herausgeber)

Serial Masterpieces
For five decades, Hartmut Böhm (*1938 in Kassel) has been working at the interface between Concrete Art, Minimal Art and Conceptual Art. The terms seriality, relief, structure, progression apply to many of his sculptures and objects. His work is about sculptural-aesthetic concepts whose differentiated proportions of disorder in the world are set against the ethos of a spiritual and ­material-specific intent of disciplined form finding. Since 2013, Hartmut Böhm has been devising a new group of works – the »table pieces«. Objects found in his studio – drawing instruments, materials, tools, ad­hesive tape, file boxes, invitation cards, flyers – are ­placed on plain tables so that each individual object becomes part of a strict, formally elaborated vocabulary, a visually com­posed arrangement. Adhering to this principle, Hartmut Böhm created the installation »or-or« for the Daimler Art Collection; it can be read as a visual essay on his entire artistic oeuvre. The display, seven meters in length, is ­extensively documented in this book. Derived from the actual proportions of the work »or-or« and its underlying ›progression ad infinitum‹, the photog­rapher Florian Böhm has developed a conceptual-visual approach for its documentation in the book. The viewer can survey and contemplate the vocabulary of Hartmut Böhm’s ­intellectual landscape, get to know the material diversity of the typographic objects, art materials and items ­selected from his studio. The artist formulated the follow­ing terms to help reading the piece: matrix and metaphor, emptiness and volume, superposition and permeation, system and syntax, form and structure.