This book aims to collect and present a comprehensive overview of the work of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. It is the result of a long and intense immersion into her archive, and intends to establish the importance of this unique artist – who did not have much recognition in the past – not only to the present day, but also to the precise political context and time to which she and her work belong.
The book presents her typewritings series, all produced between the early 1970s (some of the earliest works are dated 1972) and 1989.
Mail Art was her way to be in contact with the world outside the GDR, otherwise impossible to reach. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Reunification, the artist stopped producing any art: She felt her involvement was no longer “needed”.
At the beginning of 2015 we started to archive Ruth Wolf- Rehfeldt’s work, discovering little by little an enormous and fascinating body of work, composed by more classic poetry, simple typewriting texts, visual poetry, concrete poetry, and abstraction.
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Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt was born in Wurzen, saxony, in 1932.
In 1950 she moved to Berlin, where she still lives today. In 1954 she met the artist Robert Rehfeldt, who she married a year later. She was employed by the exhibitions department at the Academy of Arts, and spent her spare time making drawings. A few years later she started to develop what would become her typical typewriter graphics, and became an active participant in the international Mail art movement. She stopped making art after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
