Lore Bert

Lore Bert, born 1936 on July 2nd in Giessen (Germany), grown up in Darmstadt, studied 1953-57 painting in Darmstadt and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin with the sculptor Professor Hans Uhlmann, who sparked her interest in spatiality.

Working with Far Eastern Papers from Japan, Nepal, Korea and China – which often have a spatial dimension – is characteristic of her artistic work for about four decades. The collages, pictorial objects, banners and sculptures that have been created since the beginning of the 1980s, and also installations later on, up to entire paper rooms and environments, prove the artist‘s interest in material and form as well as in space and surroundings. Paper is her preferred material.

With her exhibitions in Cairo (Egypt) in 1996, further materials such as the brownish-colored papyrus and the brightly shining 23-carat gold leaf are added to her canon of colors and materials. At least since the mid-90s, light has been part of her design elements, too. This results in environments with neon writing and neon tubes, later in the form of oriental numbers and neon spheres, up to entire light rooms.

Constructive forms, geometry, architectural elements, ornaments, numbers and letters form her vocabulary of forms. The intellectual content of her work consists of the humanities and sciences, the worldviews of Galileo and Copernicus, philosophical and poetic writings (by Kant, Goethe and Rilke, by Goodman and Quine, by Macchiavelli and Dante) Mathemathics (Cantor‘s set theory) and logical contexts (truth tables), abstract properties, universal relations and the absolute in its poetic beauty. Historical contexts or cultural peculiarities of other countries, which she gets to know on the basis of her exhibitions, find their way into her work. She formulates them artistically and they shape her works global aspect.

Beginning in 1985, an exhibition in Montreal (Canada) marks the beginning of a busy international exhibition activity, which is rapidly expanding and which leads Lore Bert to Korea as soon as 1989. More than 280 exhibitions in 28 countries are documented in more than 110 publications, including more than 40 monographs on solo exhibitions in museums.

In many of these exhibitions, Lore Bert was able to realize environments created specifically for those occasions. By 2018, more than 125 installations have been realized in Europe, Asia, Africa, Arabia, the USA, the Middle East and Mexico in museums and public exhibition institutes. Often the base was a ›sea of folded papers‹ combined with different materials: light, lettered spheres, mirror sculptures in the form of the Platonic solids as at the Venice Biennial 2013 as well as at the National Museum Busan 2014 or with steles of dichroic glass, as at this year’s biennial.

Lore Bert has exhibited at biennials several times. In 1999 she was honorary artist at the

Biennial in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates) as well as honorary artist at Izmir Biennial in

2011. In 2013 she had an Collateral Event at Correr Museum‘s on occasion of the 55th Venice Art Biennale. It attracted more than 105,000 visitors and was awarded one of the top 10 cultural events in Italy this summer.

Lore Bert was honored with the Lublin City Medal for her outstanding creative achievements and her contribution to the cultural life of the city. She received the award on the occasion of the opening of her exhibition »In the Vortex of Cultures - Fragile Values« at the Muzeum Lubelskie w Lublinie (Poland).

Parallel to the 2019 Venice Art Biennial, the artist showed her breathtaking installation »Illumination – Ways to Eureka« inside San Samuele church in Venice. It consists of a pillar made from dichroic glass protruding from a heaving sea of white paper and time and time again invites the visitor to take another look and stay amazed.

In 2021 and on the occasion of Lore Bert‘s 85th birthday, exhibition centers around the world (including St. Louis/USA, Felanitx/Spain) are showing exhibitions with classic and new works by the hard-working Mainz native. The Gutenberg Museum in Mainz also presented a large show entitled Ways of World Making and the mayor of the city of Mainz also honored the artist with the ›Mainzer Teller‹ for her tireless creative work.

In December 2021, Lore Bert will also receive the important ›Signs Award‹ in the art category, the »Oscar of the communications industry« (ntv). »Here the initiators of the year are chosen.« (Handelsblatt), the social leaders, the role models of society who set an example.

Lore Bert lives and works in Mainz and Venice.