Manfred Mohr (born June 8, 1938 in
Pforzheim/
Germany) is a German artist considered to be a pioneer in the field of
digital art.[1] He has lived and worked in New York since 1981.
In 1968 he co-founded the seminar "Art et Informatique" at the
University of Vincennes and in May 1971 had a solo exhibit at ARC - Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.[2] That exhibition has become known historically as the first
solo show in a museum of works entirely calculated and drawn by a digital computer.
Mohr has received many awards including the 2013 ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art,[6] 2006 (ddaa) Digital Art Award Cologne/Berlin,[7] a fellowship from
New York Foundation for the Arts in 1997, the 1990
Golden Nica[8] from
Ars Electronica in Linz, the 1990 Camille Graeser Prize [9] in
Zürich, and the 1973 Ljubljana Print Biennial. In 1994, the first comprehensive monograph on his work was published by Waser-Verlag in
Zürich.[10]
Studies, exhibitions, and prizes
1957 - Kunst + Werkschule, Pforzheim (gold- and silversmith, painting); jazz musician (tenor-sax, oboe)
1968 - First one-man exhibition at the Daniel Templon Gallery, Paris; systematization of the picture content
1969 - Publication of the visual book Artificiata I. First drawings with a computer.
1971 - First one-man show of computer generated digital art in a museum, ARC, Museé d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris / France
1972 - Sequential computer drawings were introduced; began to work on fixed structures: the cube
1973 - Received awards at the World Print Competition-73, San Francisco, and the 10th Biennial in
Ljubljana
1977 - Began to work with the 4-D
hypercube and graph-theory
1980 - Workphase: divisibility, dissection of cube
1982 - Quasi-organic growth programs on the cube
1987 - First retrospective exhibition, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen; renewed work on the 4-D hypercube; four-dimensional rotation as generator of signs
1989 - Extended work to the 5-D and 6-D hypercube. Rotation as well as projection as generators of signs
1990 - Received the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica in Linz and the Camille Graeser Prize in Zürich
1991 - Workphase: laserglyphs, diagonal paths through 6-D hypercube are cut from steel plates with a laser
1994 - The first comprehensive monograph on Manfred Mohr was published by Waser-Verlag, Zürich
1997 - Was elected a member of the
American Abstract Artists; received an Artists' Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts
1998 - Started to use color (after using black and white for more than three decades) to show the complexity of the work through differentiation
2002 - Designed and built small PCs to run his program "space.color" and since 2004 also the program "subsets". The resulting images were visualized on LCD flat panels in a slow, non-repetitive motion.
2006 - Received the [ddaa] Digital Art Award (for digital pioneering- and original geometric research), Köl
2013 - Received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art
2013 - Honored with retrospective show The Algorithm of Manfred Mohr, 1963-now at ZKM - Media Museum, Karlsruhe
2013 - Chosen as Featured Artist in a solo show at ArtBasel/Basel with bitforms gallery
Gallery
Piece "P-306-O" (1980/82). Acryl/ Canvas/ Wood/ 4 parts
Piece "P-792_32" (2000-2007). Pigment ink on Canvas/ Wood
Piece "P1640_1322" (2014). Pigment ink on Canvas
Piece "P1611_5220" (2012/13). Pigment ink on Canvas