Hartmut Böhm

b. 1938 Kassel, Germany / d. 2021 Berlin, Germany

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Biography
Hartmut Böhm is a leading proponent of European 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. Böhm 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.

Böhm has mounted more than seventy solo and two-person exhibitions since 1964 and has participated in hundreds of group exhibitions at museums, galleries and non-profits internationally. His work is included in seventy 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.

Overview
For more than fifty years, Hartmut Böhm has been working in a variety of media, including installation, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. His work focuses 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).