Mathias Goeritz - Greeting Cards 1947 – 1986. Work in procress

For over 40 years without fault Mathias Goeritz sent Holiday greeting cards to a small group of friends and acquaintances. These were very simple designs printed in black and white on paper or cardboard cards that were later hand-painted with different colours and patterns by the artist himself. The artist’s archive contains more than 60 of these cards through which one can clearly trace his working process and preferred subjects and themes alongside four decades.

The first public exhibition of this particular timeline gathers both the cards and a selection of documents, photographs, drawings and works that relate in one way or another to this process. The whole results in a detailed portrait of the artist: both personal and professional.

Throughout Goeritz’s career there is a repeated use of particular formal schemes and constant references to a precise group of subjects. There are interconnections between his personal notes, his writing, his concrete poetry and the structure of his large-scale works. The way he mastered the use of different scales alongside his insistence in giving the same importance to the models, the small drawings and the large scale works, put in play a conceptual approach to art in which he was definitely ahead of his time.

In the intimacy of these personalized greeting cards we can retrace Goertiz’s footsteps through his friendships, his collaborations and the creative process that spun each new means of expression.