Justin Hoffmann

The artist Gustav Metzger

Gustav Metzger, Darmstadt 1989, Photo: Justin Hoffmann

Gustav Metzger was born on the 10th of April 1926 in Nuremberg as the youngest son of Orthodox Jewish parents. He escaped national-socialist persecution in January 1939 on one of the Kindertransporte to England. The greater part of his family was murdered in the Holocaust. Metzger lived in Great Britain as a stateless person and studied art at the Cambridge School of Art.

In light of his own experiences, the world appeared to Gustav Metzger as caught in a process of self-destruction. It was in this spirit that he took up causes such as that against the nuclear arms race. In the year 1959, he wrote his first manifesto Auto-Destructive Art. He conceived and produced art works that destroyed themselves, each in their own way. The first manifesto was followed by others, such as the 1961 Auto-Destructive Art, Machine Art, Auto-Creative Art. He was on the whole fascinated by processes that unfold autonomously. Thus Metzger produced light shows with warmed-up liquid crystals for the live appearances of the British rock band The Who. In 1966, he organised the Destruction in Art Symposium in London with Yoko Ono, Wolf Vostell, Hermann Nitsch, and Peter Weibel. However, in spite of such events, he was only able to convince very few people of his views, which prompted him to question the fine arts in general. He criticised the art market and called for an Art Strike. This critical disposition caused him to be excluded from the artistic milieu for a long time.

Gustav Metzger was already over 70 years old when the importance of his oeuvre began to be recognised in the 1990s. Alongside retrospectives at Kunstraum München and later the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, it was most of all a comprehensive exhibition that took place in 1999 at Kunsthalle Nürnberg that introduced the concepts and works of this groundbreaking artist to a wider audience. In his series of works Historic Photographs, he once more took up the topic of the Holocaust alongside political tragedies and environmental disasters. He covered photographs of disturbing events with diverse materials, thus rendering them only partially visible. When Gustav Metzger died in London at 90 years of age, he had become a legend to many.