SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF LORE BERT
Lore Bert, born on July 2, 1936 in Gießen, grew up in Darmstadt and studied painting in Berlin from 1953 to 1957 at the HfBK, Academy of Fine Arts under the sculptor Hans Uhlmann, who awakened her love of spatial art.
A characteristic feature of her artistic work for almost five decades is her work with Far Eastern hand-made paper, which often takes on a spatial dimension. The collages, picture objects, banners and sculptures that she has created since the early 1980s, and a little later installations, including entire paper rooms and environments, demonstrate the artist's interest in material and form, but also in space and environment. Paper is her preferred material.
With her exhibitions in Cairo in 1996, other materials such as brownish papyrus and brightly shining 23-carat gold leaf were added to her canon of colors and materials. Since the mid-1990s at the latest, light has also been one of her design elements. Environments with neon lettering and neon tubes are created, and a little later in the form of oriental numbers and neon spheres, and even entire light rooms. Constructive forms, geometry, architectural elements, ornaments, numbers and letters form her vocabulary of forms, while the humanities and natural sciences, the world views of Galileo and Copernicus, philosophical and poetic writings, mathematics and logical connections, abstract properties, universal relations and the absolute in its poetic beauty form the intellectual content of her work. Historical connections or cultural peculiarities of other cultures find their way into her work, are formulated pictorially and shape the global aspect of her work.
In 1985, Lore Bert began a lively international exhibition activity that quickly spread globally and took her to Korea in 1989. More than 325 exhibitions in 29 countries are documented in 130 publications, including more than 60 monographs on solo exhibitions in museums.
In many of these exhibitions, Lore Bert was able to realize specially designed environments. By 2024, more than 130 art spaces had been realized in museums and public exhibition institutes in Europe, Asia, North Africa, Arabia, the USA, the Middle East and Mexico. The basis was often a 'sea' of folded paper, combined with various materials: with light, with inscribed spheres, with mirror sculptures in the shape of the Platonic solids as at the Venice Biennale in 2013 or in the National Museum Busan in 2014 or - as at the 2019 Venice Biennale - with steles made of dichroic glass.
Lore Bert has been represented at biennials several times, in 1999 as an honorary artist at the Biennale in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates), in 2005 at the Paper Biennale in the Leopold Hoesch Museum in Düren, in 2011 as an honorary artist at the Biennale in Izmir (Turkey), and in 2013 she presented an ›Evento Collaterale‹ at the 55th Art Biennale in Venice in the Correr Museum on St. Mark's Square, which attracted more than 105,000 visitors and was named one of the TOP 10 cultural events in all of Italy that summer.
Parallel to the 58th Venice Art Biennale in 2019, the artist showed her breathtaking installation Illumination - Ways to Eureka in the church of San Samuele in Venice. Two columns made of dichroic glass rise out of a white, undulating sea of paper and invite the viewer to look and marvel again and again. In 2023 she took part in the Paper Biennale under the title Innovation in Contemporary Fine Art at the Vasarely Múzeum in Budapest (Hungary).
At the opening of her exhibition Under the Spell of Cultures – Fragile Values in Poland 2016, Lore Bert was awarded the ›Medal of the City of Lublin‹ for her outstanding creative achievements and her services to the cultural life of the city.
In 2021 and on the occasion of Lore Bert's 85th birthday, exhibition houses all over the world (including St. Louis/USA, Felanitx/Spain) showed exhibitions with classic and new works by the Mainz paper artist. The Gutenberg Museum in Mainz also showed a major show entitled Ways of World Making and the Mayor of the City of Mainz also honored the artist with the 'Mainz Plate' for her tireless creative work.
In December 2022, Lore Bert was finally awarded the prestigious ›Signs Award‹ of the Weimer Media Group in the ART category, the »Oscar of the communications industry« (ntv). Lore Bert lives and works in Mainz and Venice.
Triangles in Gold, picture object with Japanese paper and gold leaf, 90 x 90 cm, 2023
Star on yellow, picture object with Japanese paper, 90 x 90 cm, 2016
Chinese form, picture object with Japanese and Nepal paper, 65 x 65 cm, 2010
White circle in turquoise, picture object with Japanese paper,
60x60cm, 2004
Travel (Chinese), transparent with Japanese paper and ink, 50 x 50 cm, 2021
Beauty, Multiple-Transparent mit Japanpapier, 30 x 30 cm, 2024
Curriculum (spectral circle for JWvG), picture object with Japanese paper, 55 x 55 cm, 2009
16 Colorful Quatrefoils in Black, picture object with Japanese paper and gold leaf, 90 x 90 cm, 2017
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