Ludwig Schönherr
*1930, in Nordhausen, Germany.
2016 died in Berlin, Germany.
Ludwig Schönherr, self portrait.
Ludwig Schönherr was born in Nordhausen, Thuringia, in 1935 and is one of the greatest enigmas of 21st century art history. He died in Berlin in 2016, leaving behind an enormous body of work that is largely unknown to a wider public. Throughout his life, he was reticent about presenting his work to the public. Aside from a random single screening or the rare participation in an exhibition, he didn’t show any of his work in film, photography, drawing and installation until the last decade of his life. Despite his obscurity, Schönherr was active on the fringes of the vibrant burgeoning European avant-garde film scene of the late 1960s and early ’70s. He documented actions by Otto Mühl, was an acquaintance of Nam June Paik as well as of Anna Opperman and maintained a close relationship with the artist Dieter Roth, with whom he collaborated on films and photography projects.Schönherr dedicated himself to writing in the late 1950s and early 60s and also began engaging seriously with photography and Super 8 filmmaking. In 1967 he bought his first black and white television set which inspired him to an intensified intellectual and artistic preoccupation with television images. Over the next few years, he made dozens of single- and multiple frame silent Super 8 films of television images interrupted by flashes of color that he titled “Electronic Films” or “TV Art.”
Electronic Films, by Ludwig Schönherr, super 8, silent.
In the early 1970s, Schönherr also began work on photography projects with images that were shot off television. In accompanying written texts and notes, he theorised some of his works as ‘structural photography’ and ‘absolute photography’ and regarded the carefully structured contact sheet as his final product.The culmination of his artistic and theoretical engagement with television is certainly the multi- part project Bilderinflation (Image Inflation), 1977-78, which includes a year long work in which Schönherr shot a roll of film of television images every day according to a carefully conceived score. The result is 365 structured and enlarged photographic contact sheets that attempt to lend order and form to the influx of images in everyday life. Schönherr created monthly scores with a binary numerical system as notation for the layout of television images and white frames on contact sheets.
Score for Image Inflation - January 1978, 1978 by Ludwig Schönherr, typescript.
From Image Inflation, 1978 by Ludwig Schönherr 49 x 62 cm, enlarged photographic contact sheet.
Ludwig Schönherr, living room wall.
Ludwig Schönherr, work journal, 1964.
Schönherr's work (credited to Peter Schönherr) receives brief mention in Birgit Hein’s pioneering 1971 book Film in Underground as well as Stephen Dwoskin’s 1975 book on international avant-garde cinema Film Is. The International Free Cinema.
From Image Inflation, 1978 by Ludwig Schönherr, enlarged photographic contact sheet.
