Artist: Oskar Holweck

Patrick Heide Contemporary Art presents Oskar Holweck: One Zero Zero - the first exhibition of the artist in the UK, marking 100 years since the artist's birthday.

Oskar Holweck (1924 - 2007)

Holweck is one of those few artists who has managed to remain present in art history since the late 1950s. More than 500 exhibitions from Paris to Taipei, from Seoul to Berlin bear witness to this. Major retrospectives are being held in the Rhineland and Saarbrücken to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. A TV documentary about his life has been made and his catalogue raisonné will be published by the end of his anniversary year.

Early on, Holweck caught the attention of the ground-breaking German avant-garde group ZERO and was subsequently invited to participate in their exhibitions. His early ink drawings were serial and experimental, in line with liberating gestural experimentations in Europe and the US, always driven by the desire to explore the fundamental principles of art: light, movement and space. To illustrate that his works are nothing more than a seismographic description of the state of a moment, from the mid-1950s onwards Holweck no longer gave his works conventional titles. The title became the day the work was created.

Holweck had a particular passion for one medium: paper. Folding, cutting, compressing, crumpling, removing, scaring and drilling – he hardly omitted any experiment with and around paper. To this day, he is regarded as a “pioneer of paper art” in Europe. The tools he employed were simple: nails, screws and a drill. The results were all the more surprising! As the works were radically new, he also invented a new genre: Reissreliefs (torn reliefs), a term that describes both the process and the result.

Equally, as a university professor, Holweck developed fundamental studies based on the Bauhaus' preliminary courses, aiming to deepen the understanding of "seeing." Sehen (seeing) was also the title of an exhibition he conceived, which toured from Cologne to Zurich, London, Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester and Birmingham, where it made a significant impact on art colleges and the public.

Even after many decades, Holweck's oeuvre retains its integrity and originality. The reduction and concentration that distinguish his works still speak to us today; he could be referred to as a classic. His art is not boisterous, it is tranquil, and through its openness, it offers the viewer a pathway to self-reflection.

Siegmund Grewening

Co-editor of The Catalogue Raisonné of Works by Oskar Holweck