Konrad Balder Schäuffelen

Konrad Balder Schäuffelen (born 1929 in Ulm, died 2012 in Munich) studied medicine and philosophy in Tübingen, Munich, Paris, and Frankfurt am Main, where he also earned his doctorate. In addition to his work as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, he worked as a translator in Munich. Above all, however, he made a name for himself as a writer and artist and became a pioneer of experimental concrete and visual poetry in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, he turned his attention to language and book objects as well as installations. 

Schäuffelen created visual texts, letter sculptures, talking books, expanded text sculptures, audiovisual language collages, and graphic sculptural word games. With these intermedial and intertextual interweavings of object and sign, image and language, he explored their boundaries and areas of tension. Inspired by Dada, Surrealism, and Lettrism, he understood language and signs as material: he dismantled words, sentences, and books by well-known authors or philosophers, proverbs, quotes from newspapers, and everyday dialogues. Through recombination, he discovered new contexts of meaning that exuded irony and wit. At the same time, he exposed layers of cultural history and dissected ancient myths and insignia of religious and political power. In his installations, he also explored new media technologies such as the camera eye.

Schäuffelen’s works were exhibited at documenta 6 in 1977 and at the 42nd Venice Biennale in 1986, among other venues. In 2017, the ZKM | Karlsruhe dedicated the exhibition »language is a body, forsooth« to him as part of the »Poetic Expansions« series.

Thanks to a donation by his son Jakob Schäuffelen, Konrad Balder Schäuffelen’s estate has been part of the ZKM | Collection since 2013. The ZKM archive contains biographical documents, typescripts, sketches, drafts, postcards, posters, audio tapes, and duplicates of numerous works on paper. His books are accessible via the archive and in the ZKM | Library.