Terry Fox – Elemental Gestures

Terry Fox (b. 1943 in Seattle, d. 2008 in Cologne) was one of the leading artistic personalities of the 1960s and 1970s; today he is counted among those who, while highly regarded by their fellow artists, remain relatively unknown to the wider public. Fox’s artistic roots were in California, and he later became closely tied to the art scene in North Rhine-Westphalia. Along with Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, and Nam June Paik, Fox is considered to be one of the most important members of the Fluxus movement and a pioneer of performance and video art.

Through installations and street events, he drew attention to everyday phenomena and aspects of social existence. He investigated the energy of materials, though sound also played a central role in his work. Starting in the 1980s, Terry Fox composed multi-layered, site specific installations using objects, speech, and acoustic phenomena. In Terry Fox’s work, elementary gestures, writing, and pictographs are united with everyday materials to create an “Oeuvre” that speaks to all our senses. In addition to the photo and video works that have been researched and presented by the Akademie der Künste, Berlin for the first time on this scale, the Von der Heydt-Museum presents Fox’s sculptural work as well as his complex textual pieces from the 1990s.

The exhibition is a cooperation between the Akademie der Künste, Berlin and the BAM - Musée des Beaux-Arts Mons, the Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal and the Kunstmuseum Bern, curated by Arnold Dreyblatt and Angela Lammert, Berlin, sponsored by the Kunststiftung NRW.

A comprehensive, scholarly catalogue (available in German, English, and French) has been produced to accompany the exhibition, featuring texts by Angela Lammert, David Ross, Conny Lewallen, Arnold Dreyblatt, Lisa Steib Kathleen Bühler, Nikola Doll and Beate Eickhoff.