Manfred Mohr

Since 1987, over the course of his career, Mohr has had several museum retrospectives, notably at the Wilhelm Hack Museum, ZKM, Quadrat Josef Albers and Kunsthalle Bremen. He is represented in numerous collections such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Whitney Museum in New York and ZKM in Karlsruhe. He has taken part in many major group exhibitions, at MoMA in New York in 1980, New Tendencies 5 in Zagreb in 1973 and Construction in Process in Łódź in 1981, to name but a few.

Today Mohr stands as an example of the evolution of contemporary art driven by technological and scientific discoveries, embodying a singular spirit fuelled by curiosity and an unwavering commitment to a diverse and ever-ongoing artistic practice.

Opening Tuesday 15 October 2024, 6–9 pm.

A look at his generative work since 1969

Born in 1938 in Pforzheim, Germany, Manfred Mohr currently lives in New York, USA. His years in Paris, from 1963 to 1983, laid the foundations and brought about the realisation of his artistic thinking, which remains omnipresent in his work. Moving slowly from Abstract Expressionism to computer-generated algorithmic geometry, Mohr's artistic trajectory was catalysed by his encounter with the French computer music composer Pierre Barbaud, which led him to make his first computer-generated drawings in 1969. In the early 1970s he gained access to the French Institut National de Météorologie in Paris, where he was able to use its computer and high-resolution flatbed ink plotter outside regular working hours. At this institute he was able to produce computer-generated art for the following thirteen years, laying the foundations of his digital art and culminating in the historic solo exhibition at the ARC, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in May 1971. This research, begun in the 1960s, established Mohr as a pioneer of algorithmic art.