In motion. Harry Kramer, Kassel and the documenta

Harry Kramer would have been 100 years old on January 25, 2025. The Kassel art professor, documenta participant and initiator of the artists' necropolis in the Habichtswald is undoubtedly one of the city's most dazzling artistic personalities. To mark the occasion, the documenta archiv, Hessen Kassel Heritage and the Museum for Sepulchral Culture are presenting kinetic sculptures, films, photographs and graphics from all phases of this artistic universalist's career.

The dancer, actor and trained hairdresser Harry Kramer (1925-1997) entered the visual arts scene in the early 1950s as a self-taught artist. Throughout his life, his experimental and unconventional work oscillated between the expressive forms of the visual and performing arts. The proximity to theater, circus, fairground and spectacle runs like a red thread through his work. Early figurines for a “Mechanical Theater” (1952) were followed by award-winning experimental films and his first “Automobile Sculptures” in the 1960s. Kramer finally gained international attention with his knotted wire sculptures - filigree, mechanically animated structures that he developed in Paris from 1961. He caused a sensation with them at documenta 3 (1964). The “Light and Movement” section with the Düsseldorf Group Zero, the Swiss Jean Tinguely and other pioneers of kinetics became a sensation - Kramer's sculptures became the discovery of the exhibition.

A new chapter began in 1970 with his appointment as Professor of Sculpture at the Gesamthochschule Kassel. He gradually gave up his own sculptural work in favor of collaborative artistic projects with students: The “Atelier Kramer” was born. Unconventional teaching methods, the deliberate dissolution of genre boundaries and collective actions characterized his work as a university lecturer for more than two decades.

The exhibition In Motion. Harry Kramer, Kassel and the documenta invites visitors to experience Kramer's artistic work and his impact on the city anew - as an individualist between disciplines, as a pioneer of kinetics, as an initiator of socially relevant art projects. Almost three decades after his death, it is time to rediscover the complexity of his work.

The exhibition brings together works and multimedia documents from the documenta archiv, the Neue Galerie, the Museum für Sepulkralkultur and private collections.

Curatorial team:
Birgitta Coers and Martin Groh, documenta archiv; Gerold Eppler, Museum for Sepulchral Culture

Vernissage on October 30, 2025