In Memoriam
Hartmut Böhm (1938-2021)

January 16, 2022

Dear friends,

We hope you’re well, healthy, and in good spirits.

We’re writing with the sad news that our long-time gallery artist and dear friend Hartmut Böhm passed away in Berlin, Germany, on December 26, 2021, at age 83. Our thoughts are with his long-term partner, artist Monika Brandmeier, his son Florian Böhm, his extended family, and friends.

Hartmut was one of our very first international collaborators starting in early 2004 and was an exceedingly kind, generous, and passionate human being. He was a stalwart advocate for our ideas, projects, and the reductive artist community as a whole over the past 18 years. We will miss him dearly and be forever grateful to him.

Hartmut Böhm was a leading proponent of European Konkrete Kunst / Concrete Art and one of the most influential reductive artists of his generation. Born in Kassel, Germany in 1938, he studied at Hochschule für Bildende Künste with Arnold Bode, founder and curator of Documenta.

Hartmut produced his first systems-based work in 1959. Several years later, his work was included in the seminal exhibition Nouvelle Tendance: Propositions visuelles du mouvement international at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France in 1964. The exhibition heralded in the new Op, Kinetic, Concrete, Zero, GRAV, Gruppo T and Gruppo N art movements and highlighted works that addressed the concept of movement as conveyed through serial repetition.

For six decades, Hartmut worked across a variety of media, including installation, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. His work focused almost exclusively on the aesthetics of systems that highlight the relativity of perception and his practice is organized around four primary areas of investigation: Systems (serial structures), Perception (transparency and visual ambiguity), Gestalt (partition and outline), and Concept (linear principles and infinite progressions).

Hartmut has mounted dozens of solo and two-person exhibitions since 1964 and has participated in hundreds of group exhibitions at museums, galleries, and non-profit venues internationally.

His work is currently the subject of the probing survey exhibition entitled System and Progression at the Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst (Foundation for Conceptual Art) in Soest, Germany, through January 30, 2022.

His work is included in major public collections worldwide, including the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY); Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA); Josef Albers Museum (Bottrop, Germany); Städtisches Kunstmuseum (Bonn, Germany); Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum (Hagen, Germany); Museum für konkrete Kunst (Ingolstadt, Germany); Albertinum der Staatlichen Kunstsammlung (Dresden, Germany); Wilhelm-Hack-Museum (Ludwigshafen, Germany); Pinakothek der Moderne, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (Munich, Germany); Stiftung für konkrete Kunst (Reutlingen, Germany); Museum Ritter (Waldenbuch, Germany); Donation Albers-Honegger (Mouans-Sartoux, France); Musée Matisse (Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France); Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst (Humlebæk, Denmark); Muzeum Sztuki (Lodz, Poland); Haus für konstruktive und konkrete Kunst (Zürich, Switzerland); Richard Paul Lohse-Stiftung (Zürich, Switzerland); Mondriaanhuis (Amersfoort, The Netherlands); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Vienna, Austria); and Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Tel Aviv, Israel), among many others.

We are honored to represent Hartmut’s work here in the United States. He is also represented by drj art projects (Berlin, Germany), Bartha Contemporary (London, UK), Edition & Galerie Hoffmann (Friedberg, Germany), and Galerie Mathias Güntner (Hamburg, Germany), and Galería Roy (Felanitx, Mallorca).

We welcome your reflections on his extraordinary life and career. Please contact us anytime.

With love,
Matthew & Rossana