Elfi E. Merry

Elfi E. Fröhlich in the Käuzchensteig studio, Berlin

Elfi E. Fröhlich (* 1951 in Lünen ) is a German visual artist who mainly works in the field of conceptual photography . In addition to photographic work groups, she also creates drawings , video works and installations .

Life

Elfi Fröhlich studied from 1968 to 1970 at the Werkkunstschule Dortmund as well as at the College of Art in Leeds ( England ) and from 1971 to 1976 at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin , where she also completed an additional course in 1978 in the "Model experiment for artist further education" (today: course " Art in Context ”). After completing her studies, she took on teaching assignments at the Berlin University of the Arts and at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, as well as workshops and lectures abroad.

From 1981 to 1989 Elfi Fröhlich worked and taught as an artistic assistant for photography and fine arts at the Berlin University of the Arts (today: Berlin University of the Arts).

After visiting professorships at the Berlin University of the Arts and the GHK / University of Kassel , Elfi Fröhlich worked from 1994 to 2016 as a university professor in the liberal arts course, Faculty of Design (today Faculty of Art and Design) at the Bauhaus University Weimar .

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Fröhlich's photographic work groups from the first creative phase from 1976 to 1987 were characterized by a mixture of documentary and subjective-narrative attitude typical of author photography. The well-known groups of works from this period include, for example, “Punk Portraits” or “Pathology”.

In a further work phase, narrative photo sequences and work groups were created in which associative components and also text elements play a clear role. In addition, Elfi Fröhlich dealt intensively with the connection between photography and painting / drawing. There are overdrawings and overpaintings of photographs, slides and Polaroids, for example "elementary signs" or "navel paintings".

Even though independent drawings and drawing books have accompanied Elfi Fröhlich's work to this day, since 1987 the focus of her work has shifted almost exclusively to photography. Associative photographic tableaus full of mysteriousness and an idiosyncratic ambivalent expressiveness emerge, which seem to have sprung from the fringes between the conscious and the unconscious. The groups of works “Staging of Authenticity”, “Reflux”, “Overcoming Cruelty - Conversations with Breton” and “The Unbelievable Simultaneous”, which were important for this phase, were formed in Berlin and during their stays in Paris and Tokyo. Similar to a flaneur and close to the surrealistic method of “automatic writing” , Elfi Fröhlich works with what she sees and falls on the spot. She mixes image material from a wide variety of sources - details from paintings, television images, her own staging of still lifes and photographic “snapshots” - and at the same time hides their origin through extreme close-up vision, blurring, darkening and changes in the color values of their motifs.

One of the keys to understanding Elfi Fröhlich's connection between subjective and conceptual photography is the early work group “Staging of Authenticity”, which deals with the question of authenticity in photography. In a chain of associations following the line of the unconscious , photographs and texts emerge that stage and reflect a narrative meta-reality.

The concept of “disposal of meaning”, coined by Elfi Fröhlich, represents a next step in complex groups of works. Various photographic works emerge in which Elfi Fröhlich is

"Access to the auratic spaces of highly cultural objects is denied [...]."

- Helmut Hartwig, Elfi Fröhlichs Calgon, 2006

“Calgon” is one of these groups of works.

The subsequent accentuated turn to appropriation art by various groups of works has long been latently prepared in Elfi Fröhlich's work. Already in her first extensive “photographic scores” - as Elfi Fröhlich calls her large groups of works - in “Reflux”, which deals with the Auschwitz theme , as well as in “Conversations with Breton” or in “The Incredible Simultaneous” In addition to authentic photographs, quotes from art history and mass media are edited and integrated.

Conversely, in the "ART TABS" series, elements of the product design are implanted in historical paintings.

Contextual works expand her oeuvre. Fröhlich's group of works "Absurde Warenkkörper" parodies the relationship between "high culture art" and consumer culture by presenting the motifs in light boxes and photo displays in public spaces in absurd contexts.

Her wall installation "Three Photo Works, One Line" represents an attempt to put "measurability", "readability" and enigma into the picture and to poetically and syntactically examine the boundary between picture and non-picture.

From the intensive preoccupation with the relationship between photography and the concept of the image , various photographic works, quotations and remixes emerged in Fröhlich's reflection on “image worthiness”. In the group of works “Disparate Images and the Coherence of the Disjointed”, these raise a question about the relationship between conventionally incompatible visual languages and genre types and show photographic works that are disparate in terms of form and content and offer different references to reality and interpretation.

Elfi Fröhlich: "At a certain point my artistic work raised the pictorial-philosophical question of whether there is a connection between the incoherent and in which aesthetic form this question can be answered with photographic images."

Teaching

From 1981 to 1989 Elfi Fröhlich was artistic assistant for photography and fine arts at the Berlin University of the Arts, in 1990 visiting professor for “Technical Image Media” at the Berlin University of the Arts and 1991–1992 visiting professor for “painting and art education” at the university Kassel. Since her appointment in 1994, Elfi E. Fröhlich taught as a professor in the field of fine art at the Bauhaus University Weimar until 2016.

Despite Fröhlich's own creative focus in photography, her teaching projects always maintained an openness to other artistic media and a wide range of expressive possibilities in painting, drawing, object, video and installation. The structure of Elfi Fröhlich's projects offered students the opportunity to further develop and professionalize their own artistic positioning, taking into account their previous series of works. The titles of their semester projects often already indicated the topics that offered the students a discursive starting point for their own artistic work. For Elfi Fröhlich, it has always been fundamental to thematize the dynamics of creative processes between the unconscious and conceptualization.

Based on the titles of the following projects, such as “Complicated Triggers I-VII” (1998 to 2003), “Hyperreal, hypermental” (2002), “Latente Realities” (2008), “Flaneurs and Fictionalists” (2011/12 ), “Narrative Ambivalence” (summer semester 2014), “Contrary” (2015) or “Hybrid Constellations” (2016), the conceptual approach in Elfi Fröhlich's teaching becomes clear. In the project "Art in contact - Bauhaus goes Berlin SO 36" (2004) in the public space of Berlin Kreuzberg SO 36 , the local context was responded to with artistic interventions, the placement of objects and participatory art actions . Even in her first projects, such as “Nox academica” (1994), there were links with other genres such as experimental sound art in cooperation with the Liszt School of Music Weimar . In cooperation with non-university institutions, for example, the exhibitions she curated: “Satyrs - Flies - Rococo - Exhibition Caprioles in the Belvedere Palace in Weimar” (1996) and “Sanatorium for Aesthetic and Anesthetic Interventions” (1998) Löwenpalais Stiftung Starke Berlin.

Elfi Fröhlich is one of the five appointed founding professors of the Fine Art course at the Faculty of Design (now Art and Design ), which was newly founded in 1993 at today's Bauhaus University Weimar, and played a key role in building up the Fine Art course and developing it further in terms of content and discourses. In addition to her lectures, exhibitions and publications, she has also been actively involved in university policy for the importance and autonomy of fine art, for example in her long-term role as degree program spokesperson for fine arts, as a faculty council member and in her role as "ombudswoman for good artistic practice at the Bauhaus University Weimar ”.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions (selection)

1991: Museum of Modern Art / Palais Lichtenstein Vienna
1991: Berlinische Galerie, Museum for Modern Art, Photography and Architecture Berlin
1991: Museum Folkwang Essen
1991: Munich Photo Museum
1993: P3 Museum for Art and Environment Tokyo
1997: Kunsthalle Erfurt
1989–2001: Solo exhibitions in cooperation with Goethe Institutes , galleries and art spaces in Alexandria, Ankara, Athens, Bandung, Bangkok, Barcelona, Belgrade, Belo Horizonte, Brasilia, Bratislava, Brussels, Bucharest, Curitiba, Dublin, Eupen, Genoa, Glasgow , Gothenburg, Istanbul, Izmir, Jakarta, Cairo, Karthum, Copenhagen, Kragujevac, Kuala Lumpur, Lagos, Lome ́, London, Manchester, Milan, Manila, Moscow, Palermo, Poprad, Porto Alegre, Posen, Primorsko, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Rotterdam, Salvador-Bahia, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Singapore, Skopje, Sofia, Tel Aviv, Thessaloniki, Tokyo, Toronto and Tunis, Yaoundé.

Group exhibitions (selection)

Stockholm House of Culture
Art Association Munich
Kunsthaus Hamburg
State Art Gallery Berlin
Berlin University of the Arts
Artist workshop Munich
Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum Hagen
Linden Gallery Melbourne
Photography Biennale Rotterdam
Photography Center Los Angeles
Academy of the Arts Berlin
Kawasaki City Museum / Japan
Collins Gallery Glasgow
City Art Gallery Leeds
Riga Art Hall
St. Petersburg Marble Palace
Photo Triennial Esslingen
Museum of Modern Art Toyama
Photo gallery Vienna
New Society for Fine Art Gallery, Berlin
Belvedere Palace Weimar
Istanbul Biennial, Dolmabahce Palace
House at Waldsee Berlin
Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany Bonn

Awards and scholarships (selection)

1980: Artist grant from the Senator for Cultural Affairs Berlin
1981: Atelier in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin-Kreuzberg
1986: Scholarship for contemporary German photography from the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation, Essen
1987: Atelier in the Atelierhaus Käuzchensteig 10, Berlin-Grunewald, sponsored by the Senator for Cultural Affairs Berlin
1988/1989: Kunstfonds Werkstipendium, Bonn
1989: Working grant for photography from the Senator for Cultural Affairs Berlin
1994: Working grant from the Kulturfonds Foundation, Berlin
1996: Project funding from the Thuringian Ministry for Science, Research and Culture
2006–2011: Atelier in the International Atelierhaus Käuzchensteig 12, Berlin-Grunewald, sponsored by the Senator for Cultural Affairs Berlin

Working in public collections

Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany
Berlinische Galerie, State Museum for Modern Art, Architecture and Photography Berlin
Museum of Modern Art, Vienna
Folkwang Museum, Essen
Institute for Foreign Relations / Goethe Institute Munich
Lohtorgalerie Kreissparkasse Recklinghausen
Artothek of the New Berlin Art Association
Bauhaus University Weimar
New Museum Weimar, permanent loan from the Thuringian State Chancellery

Individual catalogs (selection)

Elfi Fröhlich - Staging of Authenticity , Goethe-Institut Munich, 1988 (Further versions in English, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese catalog translations since 1989)
Elfi Fröhlich - Reflux , Berlin University of the Arts, 1989, ISBN 978-3-924206-10-9
Overcoming Cruelty - Conversations with Breton , Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture, Berlin, 1991, ISBN 978-3-927873-08-7
Elfi Fröhlich - The Incredible Simultaneous , P 3 Museum for Art and Environment, Tochoji Zen Temple, Tokyo, Elfi Fröhlich and Senate Department for Cultural Affairs Berlin, 1993
Elfi Fröhlich - Staging of Authenticity (new edition), Institute for Foreign Relations, Berlin, 1995
Elfi Fröhlich / Klaus Elle - In a double pack , Galerie am Fischmarkt Erfurt, 1997
Calgon Ed. Elfi Fröhlich, 2006, ISBN 978-3-00-020171-4

Literature (selection)

Catalog feeling and hardness , Kunstverein Munich, 1982, ISBN 978-3-923357-04-8
Catalog Großstadtdschungel , Kunstverein München, 1982, ISBN 3-88725-007-9
Aesthetics and Violence - Yearbook for Aesthetic Education 1 , 1983, ISBN 978-3-88725-032-4
Catalog Perspektiven - Photographers in Germany and Japan , Kawasaki City Museum, Japan, 1990
Catalog Grants for Contemporary German Photography from the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation 1986/87 , Museum Folkwang Essen, 1989
Catalog City focus - six photographers from West Berlin , Collins Gallery, Glasgow, GB, 1990
Catalog Toyama Now '93 - Art Scene in Central Europe , The Museum of Modern Art Toyama, Japan, 1993
Satyrs - Flies - Rococo - Exhibition Capers in the Belvedere Palace in Weimar , Bauhaus University Weimar, 1996 (published 1998) ISBN
Catalog Your will be done ... The picture of the father of contemporary art and science , Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, 2000, ISBN 978-3-89611-080-0
Sanatorium for aesthetic and anesthetic interventions in: "Sanatorium for aesthetic and anesthetic interventions", Ed. Elfi Fröhlich, Universitätsverlag Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, 1998 (published 2000)
Visual Language , Yearbook of the Faculty of Design, Ed. G. Schweppenhäuser, Bauhaus University Weimar, 2001, ISBN 3-86068-157-5
Thesis booklet for the exhibition Revision 2001: Life and Work of the Sculptor Richard Engelmann (1868-1966) , Universitätsverlag Bauhaus Universität Weimar, 2001
Contemporary Bauhaus - Art, ELFI FRÖHLICH • CLASS • PROJECTS , Ed. Elfi Fröhlich, 2009, ISBN 978-3-00-027308-7
Elfi E. Fröhlich in: Bauhaus women - teachers and graduates of the Bauhaus University Weimar , exhibition catalog, 2019, p. 54 ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Hartwig, Helmut, "Elfi Fröhlichs Calgon" / in: ELFI FRÖHLICH CALGON, 2006

personal data
SURNAME	Merry, Elfi E.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German visual artist
DATE OF BIRTH	1951
PLACE OF BIRTH	Lünen , Germany

[1] Hartwig, Helmut, "Elfi Fröhlichs Calgon" / in: ELFI FRÖHLICH CALGON, 2006