Klaus Staudt
Horizonte
02.04. – 16.07.2017

Klaus Staudt is a welcome guest at the Kunstverein Bremerhaven: in 1980 he showed objects, double reliefs and drawings in a solo exhibition. In connection with this exhibition, the Kunstverein was able to acquire the large relief 1/51 from 1963.

As the then artistic director of studio a in Otterndorf, Staudt’s hometown, he presented the collection he had been instrumental in establishing at the Kunsthalle in 1988 with a view to a museum that seemed necessary. In return, the Kunstverein was able to present its own works from almost a hundred years of collecting in Otterndorf. In 2002, the Kunstverein was able to open the major retrospective of Klaus Staudt’s work in the Kunsthalle in collaboration with the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum Ludwigshafen and the Museum Quadrat Bottrop. In 2010, a separate room was temporarily set up in the newly created Kunstmuseum from the Kunstverein’s collection with key works by Staudt.

This brief overview illustrates Staudt’s friendly relationship with the Kunstverein Bremerhaven over more than thirty years, for which we are very grateful and for which we would like to thank this outstanding representative of systematic-constructive art.

At the heart of his work is geometric abstraction, in which he has taken an independent and distinctive position in over 50 years of work, which impresses with its continuity and stringency as well as its innovative power.

Stylistically, Klaus Staudt’s work is part of concrete art. Concrete art sees itself as the opposite of abstract art, as it does not abstract reality, but rather materializes the spiritual and is created through pure geometric construction. Mathematical and physical laws therefore form the basic theoretical concept, which is expanded in Staudt’s work through light, shadow, space and movement. By varying and combining similar elements, different lighting situations and the movement of the viewer in front of the object, he softens the geometric statics.

All of Staudt’s works have in common his way of using color. The dominance of the (non)color white is unmistakable. For Staudt, white is a synonym for light, for the interplay of light and dark, for making light visible: “I love the color white, it is open to light and changes with every radiation. White is the message of brightness, of immateriality. White is the sum of all colors.”

The three-part exhibition series in the Leopold Hoesch Museum in Düren, the Kunstmuseum Bremerhaven and the Kunstmuseum Ahlen honors the work of an artist who has held a firm place within concrete art in Germany since the post-war period. To this day, Klaus Staudt is able to continually draw new impulses from his art without exceeding the narrow framework of his preferred aesthetic principles. His art is thus not least a model and reflection of an aesthetic that is omnipresent in architecture and design today. It is the constructive moment of his art that allows for the individual in the same and the deviation in the regular, thus giving voice to an optimism of the human will to create in general.