Bernd Lohaus

Show & Culture

The prominent American figures of the minimalist movement and the restricted form from Carl André to Robert Morris, had a profound influence on the visual experience of the 1960s. Breaking away from them required developing a different aesthetic approach, also described as minimalist, notably characterized by a renewed attention to materials. In Italy and France, Arte Povera and Supports/Surfaces explored this less conceptual approach. However, despite a few emblematic German figures such as Ulrich Rückriem or Reinhard Mucha, Post-minimalism from Northern Europe remains less well represented in collections than that of New York artists. The German-born sculptor Bernd Lohaus, for example, whose life and career were spent primarily in Belgium, appears infrequently in major collections. Yet the elementary structures made of azobé wood, on which Bernd Lohaus often writes with chalk, have played a significant role in the artistic landscape of the past fifty years. His presence at Documenta IX (1992), at the invitation of Jan Hoet, attests to this. As a key figure in European post-minimalist art, Bernd Lohaus influenced an entire generation of artists, and his work as a gallerist at the seminal Wide White Space gallery in Antwerp played an important role in widely disseminating the Belgian avant-garde across Europe and the United States from 1966 to 1976.