The art of survival by Karl-Heinz Adler

Cast concrete blocks are also an option. Anyone who was born deep in the West, let’s say in Düsseldorf, has always been amazed at the variety of shapes of the cast stones that were once used in the GDR will hardly ever have understood their entire history. The story begins with the so-called formalism dispute and the “socialist realism” prescribed to GDR artists from the start by the new authorities. The artists who did not want to submit to this doctrine were left with exile in the West – let’s say: in Düsseldorf – and the establishment of “capitalist realism” there. Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke chose this option and achieved great fame as a result.

Another option was, as I said: cast stone. Karl-Heinz Adler chose this option. He didn’t exactly become famous – but he was able to make a living and remain safe from the authorities in the Dresden Production Cooperative for Visual Artists and Architects. The GDR system had a soft spot for its serial shaped stone system. Why the SED aparatschiks themselves commissioned the same abstract forms that they ostracized on paper and canvas as facade ornaments cast in concrete from VEB Stuck- und Naturstein in Berlin at the same time and used them to wallpaper the entire republic – but that is probably true remains one of the internal contradictions of the self-proclaimed better Germany, which is not exactly poor in this way.

However. For Karl-Heinz Adler, who was born in Remtengrün in Vogtland in 1927 and lived in Dresden for most of his life, it was the opportunity to exist as an abstract artist in the GDR. An impression of his artistic work, which remained largely private there – until his first solo exhibition in Dresden in 1982 – can currently be gained in the Berlin branch of the Eigen + Art gallery. A numerical focus of the show is “serial lines” made with the curve ruler, which Adler himself referred to as “geometric shapes that are destroyed”.

Whether drawing, watercolor, acrylic, graphite or collage on paper, cardboard, canvas, hardboard or chipboard: Adler proves to be on a par with the more well-known representatives of concrete art in western countries, namely Germany and Switzerland, an epicenter of this Art movement based on mathematical and geometric principles. Adler’s “Square Layering” (1957) in gray and black, based on a single basic shape, one of his earliest works, is reminiscent of some of the works by Anton Stankowski, whose art is perhaps not familiar to everyone – but the (square) logo he designed is the Deutsche Bank. Other works are more reminiscent of Max Bill or Richard Paul Lohse, the sculptures of Karl Gerstner.

Incidentally, all of these (concrete) artists, like Adler, made their living primarily through applied art, only not with cast stone, but as graphic designers, advertisers and typographers. Just because an art isn’t outlawed doesn’t necessarily mean that you can make a living from it. What you won’t find in any of his fellow artists, however, is this application of paint that consciously breaks the cold accuracy of the geometry, but expands the play of forms, sometimes lightly dabbed in an impressionistic way or sometimes thickly smeared on.

The Galerie Eigen + Art, which represents his estate (Adler died in 2018 at the age of 91), does not know whether and, if so, to what extent there were contacts between Adler and the above-mentioned concrete figures in the West. What is known is that some works ended up in an exhibition at the Malmö Kunsthalle in 1984 through unknown means and remained there until the end of the GDR and beyond. The sifting and sorting of Karl-Heinz Adler’s work, which was created more or less in secret over several decades, is far from complete.

The works presented in the show were created between 1957 and 2008 and cost between 20,000 and 60,000 euros. Karl-Heinz Adler’s concrete blocks, designed together with Friedrich Kracht in 1969, can even be admired for free in Berlin on the wall of the zoo in Friedrichsfelde and on the base of the high-rise buildings on the south side of Leipziger Straße (42-48).th