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Where the mail really gets going

“Gray and foggy weather”, wrote the Expressionist painter Karl Schmidt-Rottluff to his colleague Erich Heckel in March 1910 and decorated the front of the postcard with a sketch of the Dresden Elbe bank.

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Where the mail really gets going

“Gray and foggy weather”, wrote the Expressionist painter Karl Schmidt-Rottluff to his colleague Erich Heckel in March 1910 and decorated the front of the postcard with a sketch of the Dresden Elbe bank. As early as March 1904, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner sent what he called his “first original woodcut best regards” to his painter friend Fritz Bleyl. Succinct reduction to the essentials.

The postcard, which was introduced in Germany in 1870, gained an intrinsic value among the artists of the Brücke and among the members of the Blue Rider that went far beyond the short message in words and pictures. In the decades that followed, many artists were fascinated by the fixed format, the leveling structure of a message that could be read by anyone, dropped into a mailbox, stamped and sent by post to another location.

A form that had to cultivate hints and fragmentary references and required a great deal of understanding for the subtext and individually designed webs of relationships. The immediacy, freshness and liveliness of the pen or colored pencil drawings have long since turned the artist's postcard into a timelessly effective collector's item.

The internationally active Fluxus and conceptual artists, for example, were looking for new forms of expression beyond the classical disciplines. They integrated the postcard into their program as an everyday phenomenon that could be used artistically. According to Joseph Beuys himself, the design of a postcard was just as important as that of a large graphic.

What is special about the postcards designed by artists is the amalgamation of time and space, combined with their ephemeral character: the cards were intended neither for the archive nor for the museum, at most for the pinboard in the colleague's studio or in the collector's studio. In the 1960s, a trend emerged that acted in a post-based way, so to speak. International networking would have been impossible without Swiss Post anyway, and joint projects without postal contact would be absurd.

Ray Johnson (1927-1995), a nonconformist New York artist who was legendary in professional circles, even founded Mail Art and the New York Correspondence School. Johnson sent his texts and pictures to a circle of colleagues and asked them to be revised and disseminated. An informal network emerged, with members dedicated to creating a creatively crafted message, taking care of sending it, and finally anticipating the boundlessly unpredictable reaction of the recipient.

Johannes Sperling and Franziska Le Meur have now come up with a special way of distributing news in postcard format. It is not unlike Mail Art. With one big difference: the message-dispatch-reaction process does not end in the nirvana of artistic genius, but rather with the financial support of aid projects in the Ukraine, where war has been raging for six months now. To this end, the siblings have succeeded in reviving the medium of the postcard, which is rather nostalgic today, and in merging it with contemporary digital communication channels.

The gallery owner Sperling asked artists for mail art with drawings, watercolors or collages. The signed artist postcards will be published on a website and Instagram after their arrival and will be offered at a price of 350 euros. Interested parties can contact us by e-mail and will be drawn at random according to a digitally determined principle.

The winner transfers the donation, which can exceed the minimum amount of 350 euros, to the aid project of their choice (including Doctors Without Borders, the UN refugee agency or the feminist organization Marsh Zhinok, which supports Ukrainian women). Upon presentation of the donation receipt, the Sperlings will then send the postcard to the new owner.

So far, cards have been passed on by Monica Bonvicini, Erik van Lieshout, Mark Wallinger, Gregor Hildebrandt, Goshka Macuga and other well-known artists.

In September, the number of new entries published will increase due to the very good and, above all, rapid response. So if you want to build up or supplement a collection of contemporary art with an extremely moderately priced one-off by Julie Mehretu, Omer Fast, Rosa Barba or Tal R - these are just a few of the around 100 artists whose cards are still pending - maybe also with artist postcards , must go to the Internet early.

And if fate has decided in the form of random.org, the lucky donor can think about temporal and spatial aspects when he sees the new acquisition and philosophize about ephemerality, limitless communication and the cohesion of artist networks - but also about the worldwide ineradicable stupidity of the Masters of War .

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