The Brooklyn Rail

Franz Erhard Walther emerged as an artist amid the socio-political foment of the sixties, a decade when time’s arrow seemed most errant, most in question. During his formative years at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1962–64), he participated in Fluxus events convened by Joseph Beuys. His subsequent residency in New York (1967–73) unfolded in an avant-garde atmosphere animated by body-oriented displacements in performance, dance, and sculpture—exemplified by the experimental activities at the Judson Memorial Church. For Walther, this era’s temporal instability became a material condition—not shaped through the additive or subtractive processes of traditional sculpture, but through what he termed the activation of “working objects.” Viewer participation thus became central to understanding the sculptural situations he initiated. In his seminal 1. Werksatz (First Work Set) (1963–69), a series of sewn and vividly colored fabric sculptures propose an offbeat, nascent form of embodiment: soft forms awaiting the viewer’s bodily engagement to be fully realized.

In the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at Peter Freeman, Inc., sharply curated by Susanne Walther, a large-scale installation of one of his signature fabric works anchors the presentation: an approximately symmetrical hanging of 24 Red Volumes, a Wall Formation originally conceived in the eighties. These vertically suspended, soft, tube-like forms exist in both a literal and figurative state of suspension—between form and transformation, like pupae in gestation, poised in latent becoming. Accompanying this centerpiece is a non-chronological survey of drawings and sculptural prototypes, many of which correspond to unrealized or historically shelved projects spanning 1965 to 2019. Among these is Kunsthalle Ritter, a private museum Walther designed, represented here through models and working drawings, which was ultimately evacuated and partially destroyed following the bankruptcy of its patron’s printing business. This attention to the unrealized or interrupted introduces another temporal register within Walther’s practice: one of suspended potential and a speculative architecture shaped in the space of nascent impossibility.

In this later stage in his life and career, Walther may be reckoning with the idea that memory often escapes form — not all gestures become objects, and not all ideas crystallize into events. Yet in giving space to the unmanifested, he affirms a sculptural temporality that resists closure, inviting the viewer into a time not fixed but continually in formation. The experience is akin to stepping into an artist’s studio, mid-process, where multiple ideas take shape in a flux of intentional direction and contingent variation before being distilled into a public narrative. It’s an invitation to dwell in the multiplicity of Walther’s practice. A compelling example of this is found in “New York Cycle” , a series of drawings Walther made recalling significant moments from his six-year stay in the city. Each drawing is sketchbook-sized (16 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches), rendered in spare yet lyrical graphite lines and animated by biomorphic passages of yellow gouache. The line is ebullient yet restrained, as if attempting to render the unrenderable. One is tempted to read landscapes or figure groupings into the curvilinear gestures, especially prompted by the yellow bracketing forms—but such resolution is withheld. These images remain suspended between memorial fondness and fragmentary dissolution: recollection poised somewhere between clarity and forgetfulness. The series embodies memory in motion, resonating with Walther’s larger vision of temporality as an ongoing activation in the viewer’s present. In contrast, a series of four large drawings from 2010— “Proposal for Freiheits- und Einheitsdenkmal [National Monument to Freedom and Unity”]—locate Walther’s practice in a more historically determined mode. Similarly executed in graphite and gouache, these works commemorate German reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Here, political symbolism is transmuted into material language. Given the epochal upheaval that prompted this project, one might extrapolate how entrenched ideologies are subject to radical transformation — how their seemingly resistant forms are, in fact, ultimately malleable. These designs envision sculptural forms composed of plate-metal rectangles dispersed in seemingly random counterpoise (yet actually aligned with significant cities in Germany) across a vast memorial plaza adjacent to the Berlin Palace. Additionally, these would have been inscribed with excerpts from Walther’s characteristic lexicon, an amalgam of evocative terms such as “Response,” “Vessel,” “Memory,” and “Link,” each boldly rendered in the artist’s own interpretation of the Futura font. While much of Walther’s practice encourages activation through pliability and flux, these forms assert presence through mass and resistance. Yet embedded in their solidity is a paradox: the recognition that even the steeliest ideologies can shift overnight. And in keeping with Walther’s operative standard, one can imagine, as one must given the work remains unrealized, simply walking across the plates as a pedestrian form of “activation.”

Other works in the show include two large, boxy letter forms Alphabet Form P / OCHRE and Alphabet Form H / ROSE (both 2016/2024) that synthesize Walther’s better-known volumetric works with his lesser-known explorations of isolated texts. A related instance of this synthesis appears in Raum der Stille [Space for Tranquility] (1977), in which a glyph- or rune-like form is depicted as a freestanding isometric volume. Originally a working drawing for an unrealized sculptural design intended for the now-displaced Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne (later reconstituted as Museum Ludwig), it offers yet another example of how the abrupt fluctuations of time and institutional change condition one’s phenomenal encounter with art.

Franz Erhard Walther’s work unfolds in a space where conceptual fiction and phenomenal friction co-author form. The title of this show, Who cannot wait will stumble, excerpted from a 1992 interview with the artist, aligns with Heideggerian phenomenology, in which “whiling” (Weilen) is synonymous with dwelling: remaining with a subject long enough to perceive its multiple registers of being. Accordingly, Walther’s sculptures and related activities are not oriented toward static outcomes, but rather provisional propositions, activated through bodily engagement — whether affectively projected or physically realized. In this process, time is not a staid, presumptive plinth but a pliable material, shaped through gestural repetition, anticipation, duration, and delay. Each interaction inscribes a temporal layer onto the object, making form contingent on presence and participation. His work resides in the interval between ideation and action. In a curious aporia, and as this exhibition aptly demonstrates, Walther’s pieces resist formal conclusion in order to persist in time.