Ruth WOLF-REHFELDT: Letters

1 September - 31 October 2019

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Ruth WOLF-REHFELDT, Triumph of Architecture, 1978/80
"THE MOST POSITIVE PECULIARITY OF THIS TYPE OF ART MAY BE THE CHANCE TO TAKE UP ANY PROBLEM OF INTEREST BY ANY PERSON IN QUESTION IMMEDIATELY, AS FAR AS A TYPEWRITER IS AT HAND."

- RUTH WOLF-REHFELDT
Ruth WOLF-REHFELDT was a key figure in the Mail Art movement, in which women were rather rare. She would send her creations to her international contacts in the Mail Art networks and invited them to intervene with the works and return them: “Mail Art was a kind of safety valve, and, too, a certain satisfaction." she has stated. "I was never able to travel, but I was glad that I had contact throughout the world that all the others who were allowed to travel sometimes didn’t have.”

Among the others, she established a correspondance with Paulo BRUSCKY, with whom she exchanged works incessantly in the 1970s and 1980s, creating a connection between dictatorship-era Brazil and East Germany.

Mail Art was also an antidote to the cultural isolation of the Cold War, as correspondence was less easy to control than exhibitions, though it was routinely monitored by the government.
Her work Triumph of Architecture, modelled off of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, directly challenged the ruling government of the time as the structure was one of a few in the city that allowed visibility from one side to the other.

Her experience of the East and West divide heavily influenced her work, so much so that she stopped her practice after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as she felt she was no longer ‘needed’: “After the reunification I didn’t really wanted to make Mail Art anymore. I think Mail Art had also stopped at a large extent because of technical developments that had meanwhile taken place […]. I didn’t feel it was relevant anymore, because suddenly we had all this freedom.”
Born in Wurzen (East Germany) in 1932, Ruth trained as a typist, a stereotypically female role, which lead to her creation of ‘typewritings.’ She moved to Berlin in 1950 where she met her husband, the experimental artist Robert Rehfeldt, one of the most important postal artists in the German Democratic Republic, who would include Ruth's works in his correspondance to his fellow male artists.

Formed of singular letters and punctuation marks, these abstract compositions innovatively combined language and symbols to create recognisable patterns, geometric shapes and architectural forms, of striking beauty and complexity. Above all, the works offered a sharp critique of the GDR, whose borders she was allowed to cross, at least in intellectual exchange, only thanks to her art.
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