Oskar Holweck: One Zero Zero
Private view: Thursday, 14 November 2024
Exhibition dates: 15 November 2024 - 11 January 2025
Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is delighted to present Oskar Holweck: One Zero Zero, the German artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK, marking 100 years since the birth of this largely overlooked and recently rediscovered seminal post-war figure. The title One Zero Zero refers to both, the centenary of his birth as well as his affiliation with Group Zero, an influential post-war art movement that originated in Germany and developed international acclaim. In the spirit of Zero and other post-war art movements such as Arte Povera and Spatialism, Holweck’s oeuvre is deeply innovative, constantly pushing the boundaries of the artistic process - particularly through the use of one medium: paper. Holweck is thus considered one of the key pioneers of paper art in Europe.
The exhibition at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art features a historic overview of works sourced directly from Holweck’s estate spanning different phases of his career. One Zero Zero highlights two key aspects of Holweck’s practice: his early abstract-gestural ink drawings from the late 1950s and his groundbreaking experiments with monochrome surfaces, which emerged around the same time and continued into the 1980s. The gestural quality of his graphic work served as the foundation for his later explorations, where painterly mark-making shifts to a physical act and engagement with paper.
Oskar Holweck – Form and Texture, an expansive institutional retrospective on the occasion of his centenary, is currently on view at Saarland Museum - Moderne Galerie, Germany. Recent exhibitions include a solo presentation at Villa Zanders (Germany, 2023), a museum dedicated to works on paper, as well as the group exhibitions Manzoni in Holland at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (Netherlands, 2019), Structura ZERO foundation at ZERO Haus Düsseldorf (Germany, 2019) and The Sky as a Studio. Yves Klein and his Contemporaries at Centre Pompidou Metz (France, 2020).