Kickoff of the anniversary year for the visionary: Exhibition at the Museum Folkwang
- Foundation starts planning event series for birthday year 2027
- „Generative Art Summit“ – reloaded for the anniversary
- Exhibtion Museum Folkwang October 16th, 2026 – January 10th, 2027
Herbert W. Franke would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2027. This anniversary is an occasion for the foundation to organize an international series of exhibitions and events throughout the year under the title art meets science – Herbert W. Franke 100. A central part of the series will be several community meetings in the US and Europe, following the highly successful concept of the Generative Art Summit at the Berlin Academy of Arts. The summits will take place in partnership with well-known institutions at various locations and on different topics. At the heart of each summit is a one-day symposium that will bring together artists of different generations, scientists, and museum curators, as well as collectors, gallery owners, and representatives of art platforms on Web3. In addition to the summit symposium, the program will include a publicly accessible immersive theater experience. To this end, the foundation is inviting 16 well-known artists and artist groups to participate in a large collaborative project.
Exhibition “Herbert W. Franke / Gottfried Jäger – Kunst und Konstruktion” at the Museum Folkwang
The anniversary year will kick off with the exhibition Herbert W. Franke / Gottfried Jäger – Kunst und Konstruktion at the Museum Folkwang. This title corresponds to Franke’s first book on art, published in 1957 by Bruckmann Verlag. Up till now, it has been little known internationally. This early work already reveals all of Franke’s fundamental systematic ideas about the relationships between science, technology, and art, as well as his analytical insights into perceptual processes and their significance for aesthetics: theoretical approaches that he not only further analyzed and systematized in subsequent publications, but also consistently accompanied with artistic experiments. The reception of this book had a formative influence for the young student and photographer Gottfried Jäger, later the founder of Generative Photography. It led to an intensive exchange of ideas with Franke – which quickly established a lifelong friendship between the two kindred spirits.
For decades, the book Kunst und Konstruktion (Art and Construction) was only available second-hand. In 2026, it will be published in German again, for the first time in a new English translation. It is the first volume of the Edition Herbert W. Franke, which is being published by the foundation in collaboration with Deutscher Kunstverlag, part of the DeGrupyterBrill Group. Art historian and curator Margit Rosen, who is responsible for the Knowledge department at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, which encompasses the archives, collections, and research work at the ZKM holding the Archive Herbert W. Franke, summarizes: “At a time when algorithmic processes and artificial intelligence are redefining our understanding of creativity, the relevance of Franke’s bold assertion about the ‘artistic substance of technology’ is becoming apparent.”