Erich Buchholz

Erich Buchholz was born on 31 January 1891 in Bromberg, Province of Posen, Germany (now Bydgoszcz, Poland).

The first of these, Orbits of the Planets (Planetenbahnen), was initially designed as a matrix for making woodcut prints, but the artist gradually regarded it as a work of art of its own right and painted the surfaces.

At the exhibition Constructivism and Suprematism, organized in 1922 by the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin, he met László Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo Peri, Ernő Kállai, and El Lissitzky, people with whom he kept close contact in the following years.

[4] His studio at 15 Herkulesufer in Berlin was a meeting place for artists of the avant-garde, including—besides painters such as Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters—Dadaists writers Richard Huelsenbeck and Raoul Hausmann as well as the pioneers of abstract film Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling.

[5][6][7] A reconstruction of his studio was built and presented in 1969 in the Kunstbibliothek of Berlin, organized and curated by Hans-Peter Heidrich, the director of the Daedulus gallery.

[5] In 1923, Buchholz's interest drifted towards architecture and he started working on the use of shell forms in buildings, such as the design of an egg-form house.

[8] Besides painting, Erich Buchholz wrote several booklets and articles in which he investigated in depth the relationship between world view and the constructivist principles.

In 1964, Buchholz presented a sequence of screen-prints, "Constant-Variables," in which he explores the idea of a work of art as permeable in time and space.

Such minimal criteria set up a wider range of permutations in the course of the six variations, which transpose further shifts in the colour of the ground in relation to the fixed elements as well as in the alternation of the oblongs from a diagonal axis to a horizontal-vertical alignment[5] Erich Buchholz died in Berlin on 29 December 1972.