| 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; ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 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 Art Collection Berlin / Stuttgart; Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal; The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; Espace D'Art Concret (EAC), Mouans- Sartoux; Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Cologne; Borusan Art Collection, Istanbul; McCrory Collection, New York; Esther Grether Collection, Basel; Estrellita B. Brodsky Collection, New York; Thoma Art Foundation, Chicago; Fondation Guy & Myriam Ullens, Geneva. Mohr has had many one-person shows / retrospectives in museums and galleries like: ARC - Musée d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris 1971; Joseph Albers Museum, Bottrop 1998; Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen 1987, 2002; Museum for Concrete Art, Ingolstadt 2001; Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen 2007; Museum im Kulturspeicher, Würzburg 2005; Grazyna Kulczyk Foundation, Poznan 2007; ZKM - Media Museum, Karlsruhe 2013; Featured Artist at Art Basel, Basel 2013; Center for the Arts, Virginia Tech 2014; Simons Center Gallery, Stony Brook 2015; Kunstverein, Pforzheim 1988, 2008; Museum Pforzheim Gallery, Pforzheim 1998, 2017. He took part in innumerable group shows for example at: MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York 1980; MoMA-PS1, New York 2008; Centre Pompidou, Paris 1978, 1992, 2018; ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe 2005, 2008, 2010, 2018, 2019; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 2019; Grand Palais, Paris 2018; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 2018; LACMA | Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles Calif. 2023; Prague City Gallery (G HMP), Prague 2018; Victoria and Albert Museum (V & A), London 2009, 2018; Whitechapel Gallery, London 2016; CCCB, Barcelona 2016; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart 2005, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2017; Kunstmuseum Bremen, Bremen 2007, 2017, 2018; Vasarely Museum, Budapest, 2007, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2017, 2018; Espace D'Art Concret (EAC), Mouans- Sartoux 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2009, 2012, 2018; Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch 2005, 2006, 2008, 2013; Centro Cultural de la Villa, Madrid 1989; MoCA, Los Angeles 1975; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 1984; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco 1973, 1977, 1980; MACM - Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal 1974, 1985, 2013; Fundacion Banco Santander, Madrid 2014; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz 1981, 2011; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 1999; New Tendencies 5, Zagreb 1973; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York 1978; Galerie Paul Facchetti, Paris 1965 und Zürich 1970. Among the awards he received are: elected to the SIGGRAPH Academy, 2018; ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art, 2013; [ddaa] d.velop Digital Art Award, Berlin 2006; Artist Fellowship, New York Foundation of the Arts, New York 1997; Golden Nica from Ars Electronica, Linz 1990; Camille Graesser-Preis, Zürich 1990. |
| 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 1980 |
| 1957-1961 Kunst + Werkschule, Pforzheim - Studied Painting with Prof. Adolf Buchleiter Jazz musician (tenor-sax, oboe) |
| 1960 Action paintings |
| 1961 Introduction to the information aesthetics of Max Bense |
| 1962 Receives school prize (art) of the City of Pforzheim 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 - Lithography, Atelier Clarin Geometric experiments lead to hard edge painting Meets in Paris (1967) composer Pierre Barbaud, pioneer of computer music |
| 1968 First one-person 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-person show of digital computer generated art in a Museum, (catalog and show) ARC, Museé d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris / France |
| 1972 Sequential computer drawings are introduced Started experimenting with 16mm computer generated animations, "Square Roots", "Cubic Limit" etc |
| 1973 Begins to work on fixed structures: the cube. Uses the cube and its edges as an alphabet to develop the system "Cubic Limit" 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. Introduces "Diagonal-Paths" into his work. |
| 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 |
| 2010 Development of the program "parallelResonance". Digital-paintings and animations are also based on the 11-dimensional hypercube and its diagonal paths as graphic elements. As in all my screen works the images, are changing in a slow and non repetive motion. |
| 2012 Development of the program "Artificiata II". Digital-paintings and animations are based on the 11 to 13 dimensional hypercube and its diagonal paths as graphic elements. The animation algorithm contains random variations of speed and suites of stills adding a musical rhythm to this work. |
| 2013 Receives the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. Honored with retrospective show The Algorithm of Manfred Mohr, 1963-Now at ZKM - Media Museum, Karlsruhe and was chosen as Featured Artist, in a solo show at ArtBasel/Basel with bitforms gallery. |
| 2013-2016 Extension of his program "Artificiata II" to four parts - baseline, traces, projections and dimensions, and parity - using different aspects of the underlying algorithm. |
| 2017 Develops the programs Transit-Code by revisting his older code in a new way. |
| 2018 Elected to the SIGGRAPH Academy "for pioneering achievements in creating art through algorithmic geometry", ACM SIGGRAPH |
| 2019 Develops his program algorithmic modulations, a poetic and visual symphony of lines and clouds Elected Honorary Member of the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts, Hungarian Academy of Sciences |
| 2020 Develops his program liquid symmetry, exploring symmetry in a visual, logical, and poetic way |