| Overview: Manfred Mohr is considered a pioneer of digital art. After discovering Prof. Max Bense's information aesthetics in the early 1960's, Mohr's artistic thinking was radically changed. Within a few years, his art transformed from abstract expressionism to computer generated algorithmic geometry. Encouraged by the computer music composer Pierre Barbaud whom he met in 1967, Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969. Some of the collections in which he is represented: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Joseph Albers Museum, Bottrop; Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Chicago; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum im Kulturspeicher, Würzburg; Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen; Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal; McCrory Collection, New York; Esther Grether Collection, Basel. Mohr has had many one-man shows / retrospectives in museums and galleries like: ARC - Musée d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris; Joseph Albers Museum, Bottrop; Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen; Museum for Concrete Art, Ingolstadt; Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen; Museum im Kulturspeicher, Würzburg; Grazyna Kulczyk Foundation, Poznan. He took part in innumerable group shows for example at: MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; ZKM (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe; Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch; Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofia, Madrid; MoCA, Los Angeles; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; MoMA-PS1, New York; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; Galerie Paul Facchetti, Paris und Zürich... Among the awards he received are: Golden Nica from Ars Electronica, Linz; Camille Graesser-Preis, Zürich; [ddaa] d.velop Digital Art Award, Berlin; Artist Fellowship, New York Foundation of the Arts. |
| MANFRED MOHR Born on June 8, 1938 in Pforzheim (Germany) Lived in Barcelona, Spain from 1962-1963 Studio in Paris from 1963 to 1983 Lives and works in New York since 1981 |
| 1957-1961 Kunst + Werkschule, Pforzheim Jazz musician (tenor-sax, oboe) |
| 1960 Action paintings |
| 1961 Receives school prize (art) of the City of Pforzheim Introduction to the information aesthetics of Max Bense |
| 1962 1962-1963 lives in Barcelona, Spain Begins the exclusive use of black and white as means of visual and aesthetic expression |
| 1964-1967 Studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris Geometric experiments lead to hard edge painting Meets in Paris (1967) composer Pierre Barbaud, pioneer of computer music |
| 1968 First one-man exhibition at the Daniel Templon Gallery, Paris Systematization of the picture content |
| 1969 Publication of the visual book 'Artificiata I' First drawings with a computer Founding member of the seminar 'Art et Informatique' University of Vincennes, Paris Meets mathematician Estarose Wolfson |
| 1971 First one-man show of computer generated art in a Museum, ARC, Museé d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris / France |
| 1972 Sequencial computer drawings are introduced Begins to work on fixed structures: the cube |
| 1973 Receives awards at the World Print Competition-73, San Francisco, and the 10th Biennial in Ljubljana |
| 1977 Begins to work with the 4-D hypercube and graph-theory |
| 1980 Workphase: Divisibility, dissection of cube |
| 1982 Quasi-organic growth programs on the cube |
| 1987 First retrospective exhibition, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen Renews work on the 4-D hypercube. Four-dimensional rotation as generator of signs |
| 1989 Extends work to the 5-D and 6-D hypercube. Rotation as well as projection as generators of signs |
| 1990 Receives the 'Golden Nica' at Prix Ars Electronica in Linz and the 'Camille Graeser Prize' in Zürich |
| 1991 Workphase: Laserglyphs, diagonal-paths through 6-D hypercube are cut from steel plates with a laser |
| 1994 The first comprehensive monograph on Manfred Mohr is published by Waser-Verlag, Zürich |
| 1997 Is elected a member of the American Abstract Artists Receives an Artists' Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts |
| 1998 Selected for Pioneering Artists, Siggraph Orlando, Florida Invited to sign the Golden Book of Pforzheim, Germany Starts to use color (after using black and white for more than three decades) to show the complexity of the work through differentiation |
| 2002 Designs and builds small pc's to run his program "space.color" and since 2004 also the program "subsets" The resulting images are visualized in real time on LCD flat panels in a slow, non repetitive motion |
| 2006 Receives the d.velop digital art award [ddaa] for digital pioneering, Köln / Bremen |
| 2007 Develops the program "klangfarben", which encompasses a body of paintings and animations based on the 11-dimensional hypercube using its diagonal paths as compositional building blocks The program runs on a PC and the resulting images (animation) are visualized in real time on two square LCD flat panels in a slow, non-repetitive motion |