Bernhard Sandfort

Bernhard Sandfort (1936, Cologne – 2020, Mannheim) studied at the Cologne Werkschulen and the Staatliche Werkkunstschule in Kassel after completing an apprenticeship as a carpenter. He turned to painting as a self-taught artist. Distinguishing himself from Informel and Tachism, he developed a rigorous painterly concept based on both geometric abstraction and random processes. His work is closely related to concrete art with its rational calculation on the one hand, and Op Art, which invites the audience to interact with the work, on the other. 

Sandfort’s multi-part, large-format paintings feature bold stripes of color that create geometric structures. Sandfort used principles of chance to determine the angle of the lines in relation to each other and the color sequences. The canvases are often arranged in a modular fashion. In 1968, he coined the term »metastatic« or »dialogical« painting to describe this approach. What he meant by this was a principle that is not only based on the static constants of the horizontal and vertical, but also aesthetically explores the dialectic of systematics and chance, order and entropy in the scientific sense.

Influenced by the ideas of post-war modernism, which assumed that art could help shape society, Sandfort founded the Galerie für kollektive Kunst in Berlin in 1969 – the first producer gallery in Germany. In doing so, he made the art world itself the subject of his work. 

In 1970, he opened the Augenladen producer gallery in Mannheim. After dialogical painting, he now sought direct dialogue with visitors. This socio-political engagement also manifested itself in the »Museum der Fragen,« an art project that he continuously expanded from 1977 onwards. In performative surveys in public spaces, Sandfort encouraged people to ask their own questions. Instead of providing ready-made answers, he gave space to doubts, diversity of opinion, and openness, thus making a real contribution to democratic discourse at the local level. The collection of the »Museum der Fragen« documents the changes in mentality and political currents of those years.

In 2012, the ZKM dedicated the exhibition »Dialogische Malerei und das Museum der Fragen« to Bernhard Sandfort, as well as the publication »Bernhard Sandfort: Produzentengalerie, Dialogische Malerei, Museum der Fragen.«

Bernhard Sandfort’s archive has been housed at the ZKM since 2020. It contains typescripts, correspondence, photographs, invitations, flyers, and newspaper articles about his exhibitions, the producer galleries, and the »Museum der Fragen.«