Out of the Attic, Wolfgang Kiwus
With this exhibition we commemorate the impressive work of Wolfgang Kiwus, who passed away in 2022.
Wolfgang Kiwus (1939 – 2022)
Wolfgang Kiwus, who lived in Stuttgart, had been familiar with the writings of Max Bense from an early age and they formed one of the philosophical foundations for his work. A friend of Frieder Nake, he has exhibited several times with Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr, Georg Nees and Herbert W. Franke. We are pleased to present his unique view through generative works on paper for the first time in Berlin.
Wolfgang Kiwus was originally a musician who also wrote poems, radio plays and essays. In the mid-eighties, he began to create program-controlled images on screens and to program image-generating automata. His first works on paper, made around 1987, were produced with a dot matrix printer. In 1991 he began to work with a pen plotter and the first exhibitions followed.
For him, computer artists are those who programme their own paintings and drawings, not those who use computers and digital media as tools. “I don’t say it’s computer literature when I have written a text with a word processor”.
Many of his drawings refer to Max Bense’s essay “Der Geistige Mensch und die Technik”, published in 1947. This essay is about the hardships of the spiritual man, about the difference between the spirit of freedom and the creative and the spirit of the rational.
Kiwus’s work is characterised by regulation and process rather than chance. He developed his fundamental algorithms in his early dot matrix printing phase. Encryption and decryption also played an important role for him.
Installation view
Works
