KRIWET — yester ´n´ today
19.2. – 1.5.2011

The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is the first institution to dedicate a comprehensive solo exhibition to the complete body of work of Ferdinand Kriwet (b. 1942), a native of Düsseldorf.

Ferdinand Kriwet is a pioneer of media art. Ahead of his time, he engaged as early as the 1960s in exhibitions, stage performances and radio plays with viewing habits shaped by the sensory overload of mass media, and analysed the language of television, advertising and photography. Kriwet, whose roots lie in concrete poetry, describes himself as a poet. At the age of just 19, he published “Rotor”, his first publication with the Cologne publisher M. DuMont-Schauberg. With the group of works “Rundscheiben”, created in the early 1960s, he devised texts without beginning or end, with ambiguous and indeterminate content that prescribes no reading direction. In the following years, his neon writings, wall paintings and signage systems took hold of public space; he produced numerous radio pieces and designed art-in-architecture projects, such as the coat of arms for the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament or his “Super-Seh-Texte” for the canteen of Ruhr-Universität Bochum, before gradually withdrawing from the art world in the late 1980s.

In his home city of Düsseldorf, the artist was last shown in 1975, with an exhibition at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen and as part of the legendary art space Creamcheese. Now, more than 35 years later, this retrospectively conceived exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of Kriwet’s multifaceted body of work. Alongside the early Rundscheiben and Poem Paintings, it shows his audio and spoken-word texts, publications, film and television contributions, neon works, and new mixed-media installations created specifically for the exhibition.

Please find here the catalogue of the exhibition.