Robert Rehfeldt
Mail Message from my Studio
ChertLüdde, Berlin
2 May – 25 July 2026

Inter Alios, Inter Alia: Robert Rehfeldt Between Mail Art and Painting – Christopher Williams-Wynn

“If it wants to achieve widespread impact, art must pull out all the stops,” Robert Rehfeldt asserted in 1977, “from traditional painting to avant-garde experimentation.”¹ Although offered as a general declaration, this statement also attests to the variation in his own practice. Seeming to live by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s dictum that “[i]n a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities,” he worked across a wide range of media—from painting to performance, prints to installations, and film to mail art.² For that reason critics have described him as a “border crosser,” “like a kind of large mixing device,” “extremely multifaceted,” and the “most versatile experimenter.”³ Taking his historical experience into account, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, his partner and fellow artist, identified a contrarian streak that manifested as a tendency to chafe against the expectations of one political system or another.⁴ Born in 1931, Rehfeldt spent most of World War II with foster carers in Austria. He returned to Berlin with his mother in 1946—to what was then the Soviet Occupation Zone—before studying at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in West Berlin between 1948 and 1953. After living in the Berlin district of Mitte, he moved to Pankow, a location in the northwest of the divided city that became his base of operations for forty years. Alongside his studio practice, he corresponded with hundreds of artists from the early 1970s until he passed away in 1993, becoming one of the most internationally-connected artists in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Rehfeldt’s practice remains striking for the ways it ties together the international and the intermedial. Throughout his decades-long career, he held onto the possibility that proliferating connections between artists and expanding the terms of artistic production would not just challenge conventions, as the gallerist Jürgen Schweinebraden contended, but contribute to a shift in the character of social relations.⁵ However utopian, that impulse drove his indefatigable pursuit of exchange and underpinned his explorations of media. In other words, he worked inter alios and inter alia. To unpack these dimensions of his work, this essay focuses on his mail art and painting. In the 1970s, he intensified his involvement in the mail art network, and collaborated at a distance with Horacio Zabala, an artist living in Buenos Aires during a period of intensifying political violence. Time in the studio was equally important for Rehfeldt. Over the course of the 1980s, he produced a number of paintings that show how he worked in and between idioms, and in the process found ways to address prevailing social conditions in the GDR. Surveying a range of his works brings into focus the contradictory operations that he employed: gathering and dispersing material via mail art networks while combining and fragmenting painterly conventions.

Mail Art Inter Alios

Rehfeldt entered the mail art network in the early 1970s. His initial contact came through the artist Klaus Groh in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and via Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski in Poland, who founded the NET in 1971 as an informal network. This scattered community of artists exchanged works—postcards, photocopies, rubber-stamp impressions, and small objects—through the postal system, often but not always accounting for the ways that it shaped the forms and parameters of their communication. The emergence of this network is often credited to Ray Johnson, who mailed instructions to friends and colleagues during the 1950s, or linked to the circulation of multiples by Fluxus artists, most famously George Maciunas.⁶ Taking stock of its development, Rehfeldt offered a more expansive history. He not only located mail art activities in the lineage of Marcel Duchamp but pointed out artists’ circulations of postcards and other forms of correspondence that expanded in the nineteenth century.⁷ Part of the appeal for him, as seen in the postcards on display, was that these exchanges took place outside museums and galleries, and so achieved a certain distance from traditional institutions.

Rehfeldt quickly became a key node as he networked with artists across the Americas, Asia, and Europe. His energetic participation offset typical constraints of the studio, which, appropriately enough, became an information clearinghouse for international artistic developments. The term he coined to describe his activities—“contart” (contact art)—highlights his primary interest, as indicated in Blatt aus Mappe (KUNSTPOSTBRIEFE) (1982).

More significant than the production of individual works was the opportunity to forge bonds with fellow artists, which was otherwise difficult due to state censorship and travel restrictions.⁸ That drive to connect was partly a response to conditions in the GDR, but it would be a mistake to view it so myopically. In an essay to accompany Postkarten und Künstlerkarten: Eine kulturgeschichtliche Dokumentation (Postcards and Artist Cards: A Cultural Historical Record), a 1978 exhibition of over 1,600 works at Galerie Arkade in East Berlin, Rehfeldt attributed a deeper significance to artistic exchange, a response that touched on the status of the artist in modernity. He commented that “artists were aware of their natural isolation, caused by working alone in their studios, which they sought to overcome through postal correspondence with other artists.”⁹ His remarks pinpoint atomization as a key problem faced by artists, seemingly irrespective of their sociopolitical circumstances.

Three years earlier, Rehfeldt had already begun to work through that problem in a joint exhibition with Wolf-Rehfeldt at Galeria Teatr Studio in Warsaw. Their first major project together highlights the countermovements between accumulation and dispersal typical of mail art exhibitions. While Wolf-Rehfeldt featured her typewritten prints—what she called “typewritings”—on one side of the gallery, installing a functioning typewriter on a chair for visitors to use, Rehfeldt opted to expand the scope of involvement through the postal system. He invited a range of artists to send work to be exhibited, which led to a collaborative production with Horacio Zabala. Born in Buenos Aires in 1943, Zabala studied architecture at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and began working as an artist in the 1960s, with his first solo exhibition in 1967. He also saw the potential of mail art to reach a far wider range of artists than would be possible via typical artworld channels, even if it meant relying on countless institutions and bureaucracies. In contact with each other from at least 1973, as correspondence in the Mail Art Archive confirms, they co-produced a poster. Zabala wrote the text “EL ARTE ACTUAL ES UNA CÁRCEL / THE ACTUAL ART IS A JAIL” by hand and mailed the poster to Rehfeldt, who stamped the well-known political slogan “Venceremos Solidarios” (We Shall Overcome in Solidarity) onto it, before hanging it on the wall.

This collaborative tendency continued through mail art projects that Zabala was pursuing at the time. In 1975, together with Edgardo Antonio Vigo, he organized Última exposición internacional de artecorreo ’75 (Last International Exhibition of Mail Art ’75) at Galería Arte Nuevo in Buenos Aires, which featured almost 200 artists, including Rehfeldt. At the same time, Zabala and Vigo were rethinking the terms of artistic practice via mail art, leading to their co-authored essay “Arte-correo: Una nueva forma de expresión” (Mail Art: A New Form of Expression). Although its first publication is usually attributed to a 1976 issue of Buzón de Arte/Arte de Buzón, a short-lived magazine for mail art proposals published in Venezuela, the version in this exhibition shows that it was dated September–October 1975.¹⁰ Given the timing, the text was probably written while they organized the exhibition. In it, they reflect on differing systems of communication and suggest that mail art marks a shift from the work of art conceived as a unique entity to a multiple dispersed in a more or less open network.

These projects emerged from a body of work that grappled with political developments in Latin America. In 1973, Zabala produced and circulated Explotación es terrorismo (Exploitation is Terrorism), a partially burnt punch card with an arrow scrawled in red pencil pointing to a serial number and IBM branding. Media for computer programming, these cards were issued by the US multinational corporation and used across industries and government departments. The dominance of Big Blue, as the firm was nicknamed, was indicative of the ways that advanced technology was coupled to business interests and internal political repression, a situation that prompted Zabala to liken international exploitation to terrorism. Concerns over regional power plays also emerged in his Tension Force Area (1974). With a formula for tension (tension=force/area) overlaid onto maps of the region, this print-based work concisely alludes to mounting censorship and repression in various countries following numerous military coups in the 1960s. Even more disturbing is his 1973 series Anteproyectos de arquitectura carcelaria latinoamericana para artistas (Preliminary Projects of Latin American Prison Architecture for Artists). Using his architectural training, Zabala carefully drafted designs for prison cells that responded to the brutal military regime that ruled Argentina.¹¹ Particularly unsettling is the individualized character of his compositions. This vision of a carceral archipelago is not defined by unrelenting uniformity but by a sequence of personalized forms of containment. Some of these cells are even adapted to different environments, such as the Río de la Plata.¹² Beyond commenting on the repressive military regime, the sketches offer a more troubling proposition: artistic production may actually perpetuate confinement and isolation. Far from ascribing a potentially liberatory function to art, as Rehfeldt had, Zabala and other artists in Argentina, like Juan Pablo Renzi, doubted the viability of cultural practice to mount a substantive response to the overwhelming force of a militarized polity and consumerist society.¹³

Doubling down on the markers of censorship, with which Rehfeldt was also all too familiar, Zabala stamps the work with the official-looking “censurado” (censored). Whereas official censorship would either withdraw an item from circulation or render it at least partially illegible, here that operation itself is put into play. He prompts the viewer-reader to inspect the work for traces of loss or tampering, while also pointing to possible self-censorship in advance of any actual production. The pressure signaled in those works soon became too great to bear. In 1976, at the beginning of Rafael Videla’s brutally repressive rule, Zabala left Argentina for Italy to continue his practice in exile. Meanwhile, Rehfeldt made his own arch allusions to state intervention. Printing and circulating postcards with phrases such as “Denken Sie jetzt bitte nicht an mich” (Please do not think of me now), he addressed, with sarcastic politeness, both the functionaries tasked with rifling through his mail as well as his acquaintances.

Physically closer but separated by geopolitics, Zabala remained in contact with Rehfeldt and Wolf-Rehfeldt throughout the 1970s and ’80s. Keen to keep up participatory projects, he solicited their contributions to his Today, Art is a Prison initiative. The project continued Zabala’s interrogation of art’s possible role in the face of social and political suppression. He invited dozens of artists, critics, and architects to self-reflexively respond to this statement and exhibited their responses free of reductive summaries or hasty conclusions. Wolf-Rehfeldt’s own contribution offered a German translation of the phrase on the back of one of her postcard-sized typewritings that features an architectural structure composed of tightly-packed and carefully-arranged characters. These international intersections highlight the manifold tactics being developed to navigate the modalities of political and social repression.

Painting Inter Alia

The intensity of Robert Rehfeldt’s international exchanges, which grew to include thousands of items of correspondence, complemented rather than replaced his studio practice. After all, as he insisted, “art had to pull out all the stops.” He had been painting since the 1950s, initially in a largely representational mode, producing portraits, still lives, and street scenes. Not content to merely visually depict moments of social encounter, between 1972 and 1987 he organized the drawing and painting group Palette Nord in Pankow, which grew into a lively gathering of artistic peers and friends.¹⁴ During this period his practice shifted once more. His canvases from the 1980s are based on mixed-media and collage techniques similar to those used by Rüdiger Philipp Bruhn and Dieter Tucholke (whom he had known since the 1950s), though he frequently employed darker tones. That brooding quality has tended to dominate the reception of Rehfeldt’s works. Discussing them in associative terms, Blume proposes that these works, “with their meditative and sometimes even gloomy mood, mirror a stagnant, closed society.”¹⁵ To see the paintings as reflections, however, trades in metaphors that suggests art is almost an automatic, spontaneous result of social conditions. Examining Rehfeldt’s materials and method suggests a far more complex process.¹⁶ Dealing with the color field and role of inscription in particular, he carried over a structural impulse to connect and array, disperse and fragment into some of his last paintings produced in the GDR.

Across his works, Rehfeldt often employed subtly modulated colors to produce a visual field that shifts between intimations of surface and depth. Patches of beige and tan punch through the deep brown field of Untitled (mid-1980s/a), while partially broken lines of red and blue paint offset the balance provided by the quadratic format. Toward the center top, a closed loop—an eyelet or noose—turns the cross back on itself. Those colors fade in and out of one another, while washes of pigment spill over the canvas in Untitled (1980s–1990/c). Flashes of rose and orange burst through on either side of a conspicuous, if patchy, band of white, recalling the inward-facing surfaces of the Berlin Wall painted a luminous white to make any escape attempts highly visible.

Even as the treatment of those surfaces invites an apparently weightless, optical drift, the applications of paint attests to its materiality. In Untitled (1980s–1990/b), the use of gesso lends the canvas a literal heft, an assertion of volume and mass that verges on the sculptural. In other works, thick impasto anchors the field of graduated color to the support. Textures are equally variable, at times shifting abruptly from sheer planes to gritty surfaces. In these respects, the worked surfaces recall the art brut of Jean Dubuffet, especially the prominence he granted to materials and processes between the 1940s and late ’50s. Dubuffet’s works, as Hal Foster argues, display a tension between the elevation of cultural production and its debasement, an oscillation that challenges stultified notions of worth and value.¹⁷ In the GDR, of course, the concrete was of paramount significance for it entailed the “unity of diverse aspects” associated with productive, “useful” forms of labor.¹⁸ By refusing resolution and keeping that shift between optical and tactile registers in play, Rehfeldt’s works unsettle those expectations of any neat union.

In certain works, these divisions and their refutation are thematized as compositional tactics. At the bottom of Untitled (n.d.), a section of densely applied paint—whites and yellows over a muddy green field with hints of cobalt blue—offsets a grey-green section that looms above, its virtually uniform tone only relieved by the textured motif of the cross. Dividing these sections is an undulating band of evenly applied black paint, almost without any traces of brushwork in comparison to the two other sections. Suggestive of splits and gaps as much as barriers and borders, the canvas offers a coded sign of the Berlin Wall, which stood only 2.2 kilometers from his studio on Mendelstraße in Pankow. Where painters like Stefan Plenkers and Roland Nicolaus offered blunt depictions of the Wall, Rehfeldt’s makes a subtler, pictorial point through a somewhat capricious composition. An indiscriminate division of the painted plane, in the sense that it lacks a clear structural or material reason for the particular breaks, suggests the arbitrariness of other divisions running through the city.

Working the surface so intensively situates painting as a thoroughly material arena for juxtaposing texts and images, drawing and painting. In Scriptulares Zeichenbild II (1985), Rehfeldt alludes to the thin lines that separate painting, drawing, and writing. The painting is configured as an inventory of mark-making: letters that never quite cohere, tracings suggestive of scrawled graffiti, and rudimentary stick figures. In contrast to the weightiness of his fields of color, patches of chalk nearly vanish in places, as in the washes of blue just above the center. In a further permutation of the line, Untitled (1980s–1990/c) and Untitled (1980s–1990/b) exchange the trace for the imprint, with marks carved into the impasto treatment of the surface.

Shifts between painterly registers unsettle the possibilities of depiction. The color field of Zeichenbild (Scriptural) (1982), punctuated by light sandy touches on the right and a trunk-like form running along the central axis, figures as a ground and a void. On the left, a visage with mouth agape, tilted slightly upwards, is rendered with the tell-tale matrix of a halftone, as Rehfeldt had painted this composition over a large poster.¹⁹ Edges of this face dissolve, leaving it almost swallowed by the surrounding field of grey-cedar brown. This time, when inscription coheres into writing, it signals refusal. Just beneath this countenance, “NO” is clearly visible, etched into the surface as an echo of Zabala’s censorial stamps. That array of marks recall, too, scrawled lines of graffiti. Illicit marks attracted the attention of the notorious Ministry for State Security (Ministerium for Staatssicherheit, or Stasi), tasked with policing the terms and sites of communication.²⁰ With this maneuver, Rehfeldt creates a collision between the signs of public space and the private studio, threading them through one another while refraining from clearly stating the object of that negation.

By alternating between idioms, often on the same canvas, Rehfeldt shows the ambivalence of inscription, the vanishingly fine line between figure and discourse. Almost absorbed by the pigment itself, the scrawled sign teeters on the edge of its disappearance. That precarity takes on a particularly poignant significance in the GDR. The machinery of state, especially the Stasi, dedicated enormous amounts of time and resources to ascriptions of authorship, enacting one of Michel Foucault’s lessons. “If by accident or design a text was presented anonymously,” he observed, “every effort was made to locate its author.”²¹ Authors were “produced” as much by institutional conditions as by conventions of grammar or style. At least as important was the ascription of meaning. Deciphering the significance of any utterance or inscription, typed element or painted mark, was necessary to adjudicate the lines between adherence and deviation. Those looping lines mime the hasty scrawl of graffiti—the motivated mark made in public space—but may equally stand for automatic procedures of drawing, emanations of the arbitrary made in the studio.

Inconclusions

Whether navigating the state-sanctioned postal system or holing up in the studio to paint, Rehfeldt not only negotiated gaps in the system of surveillance but carved out a place within it. Given that the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, it becomes too easy in hindsight to follow Blume in seeing the paintings as somber indexes of stagnation on the verge of implosion or to regard the various works of mail art as just a series of attempts to escape the yoke of the party. If anything, Rehfeldt’s range attests to the social and cultural dynamics playing out in the GDR. As scholars have more recently argued, there were not only many GDRs, interleaved with one another depending on an individual’s circumstances, but the ends of those GDRs are ongoing. Both contentions militate against tendencies to reduce multifaceted phenomena to singular historical trends or events.²² Moreover, that decade saw, as Rehfeldt was well aware, many highly experimental types of practice. Artists and others were forging counterpublics despite crackdowns on figures like Lutz Wohlrab and Klaus Werner and the character assassinations associated with “disintegration” tactics deployed against groups like Clara Mosch. Perhaps what is so often attributed to Rehfeldt’s practice—its constitutive multiplicity—is a recognition of the complexity of experience in the GDR, its nuances long suppressed in the name of post-1989 harmony.

The dissolution of the GDR did not eradicate instruments of power but replaced them over the course of the 1990s. Politicians sold off state assets under the mantra “there is no alternative” and implemented an economic shock doctrine designed to make the market the chief arbiter of social worth. Cynically appealing to the Vaterland, they fueled new waves of nationalism that Rehfeldt had in his own small ways worked against. Unsurprisingly, the spectacle of Einheit was on full display on the eve of October 3, 1990, when the two Germanys were officially unified. Amid the speeches and fireworks at the Reichstag around midnight, the black, red, and gold of the West German flag was displayed as a symbol of egalitarian freedom, even if, as playwright Heiner Müller caustically remarked at the end of the previous year, “democracy has no roots in the FRG.”²³ While that provocative claim remains up for debate, signs of anti-democratic forces could also be seen in the crowd. Some individuals waved the Reichskriegsflagge of the German Empire, its black, white, and red comprising a potent symbol adopted by increasingly violent right-wing groups. Against that epochal upheaval, Untitled (1980s–1990/c) appears as a cipher, the bands of color that divide the painting loosely inverting those of flags from the imperial era. With that maneuver, Rehfeldt signals distress in the FRG, or perhaps issues an oblique warning against xenophobia. As artists, critics, activists, and scholars face renewed suppression, it bears recalling one of Rehfeldt’s most enduring statements: “Kunst ist wenn sie trotzdem entsteht” (Art is when it is created anyway). Bridging containment and control, restrictions and repression, pressure and possibility, he worked among others and across media, that is, inter alios and inter alia, and always against unity.

Notes:

1. “man sollte auch nicht verkennen, das [sic] kunst will sie breitenwirkung erzielen alle register ziehen muß, von der traditionellen malerei bis zum avant-garde experiment, diese quantität bestimmt hier die zukünftige qualität.” Robert Rehfeldt, “Kunst Zwischen Hammer Und Pinsel,” KUNSTmagazin 17, no. 3 (1977): 8. For the sake of fidelity, Rehfeldt’s non-capitalization of nouns is retained. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations by Christopher Williams-Wynn.
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1932; Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 418.
3. “Grenzgänger,” “wie eine Art großes Mixgerät,” “äußerst vielseitig,” and “der vielseitigste Experimentator.” Wolfgang Leber, “Gruß an einen Mailartisten ohne Antwort – Der Grenzgänger Robert Rehfeldt,” and Eugen Blume, “Robert Rehfeldt – Ein Fließender, ein wahrer Fluxmensch,” in Robert Rehfeldt: Kunst im Kontakt, ed. Lutz Wohlrab (Berlin: Verlag Lutz Wohlrab, 2009); Eugen Blume, “[Untitled],” in Robert Rehfeldt: Malerei, Grafik, Assemblagen, Collagen (Dresden: Leonhardi-Museum and Galerie Ost, 1987); and, Lothar Lang, Malerei und Graphik in der DDR (Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam jun., 1983), 180. See also Felice Fey, Verschwiegene Kunst: Die Internationale Moderne in der DDR (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2021), 119–38.
4. Rehfeldt had experienced so much as a child, she explained, “that he probably did not really know who he was” (dass er wahrscheinlich nicht richtig wusste, wer er war). Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, cited in Valeri Scherstjanoi et al., “Ich danke Ihnen für Ihre Post,” in Wohlrab, ed., Robert Rehfeldt: Kunst im Kontakt, 66.
5. Jürgen Schweinebraden, “[Untitled],” in Robert Rehfeldt: Materialbilder, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, 1962–1972, ed. Klaus Werner (Berlin: Galerie Arkade, 1975).
6. Edward M. Plunkett, “Send Letters, Postcards, Drawings, and Objects…,” Art Journal 36, no. 3 (1977): 233–41; Miriam Kienle, Queer Networks: Ray Johnson’s Correspondence Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023); and, Colby Chamberlain, Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024). The term “mail art,” as a characterization of artistic practices that engage with various elements of the postal system, achieved particular prominence in the 7th Paris Biennale (1971). See Jean-Marc Poinsot, Mail Art: Communication à distance, concept (Paris: CEDIC, 1971).
7. Robert Rehfeldt, “Kunst Frei Haus,” in Postkarten und Künstlerkarten: Eine kulturgeschichtliche Dokumentation, ed. Klaus Werner (Berlin: Galerie Arkade and Staatlicher Kunsthandel der DDR, 1978), 84.
8. While artists often insisted that mail art exhibited an open, democratic character, it was far from a utopian field of practice. Ulises Carrión, who corresponded with Rehfeldt and Wolf-Rehfeldt, pointed out in the late 1970s that artists’ reliance on the postal system entailed dependency and compromise, and meant reckoning with the imposition of state power. Ulises Carrión, “Mail Art and the Big Monster,” in Erratic Art Mail International System (1978; Odder, Denmark: Egmont Højskolen, 1979). This “alternative” system was, moreover, heavily dominated by male artists, and in that respect reproduced broader gender hierarchies.
9. “die künstler waren aber auch ihrer naturgemäßen isolation bewußt, hervorgerufen durch das einzelschaffen im atelier suchten sie so dieses im postalischen Zwiegespräch mit anderen künstlern zu überwinden.” See Rehfeldt, “Kunst Frei Haus,” 84.
10. Edgardo Antonio Vigo and Horacio Zabala, “Arte-Correo: Una Nueva Forma de Expresión,” Buzón de Arte/Arte de Buzón 1, no. 1 (1976).
11. On the Anteproyectos, see Fernando Davis, “Horacio Zabala, desde 1972,” in Horacio Zabala, desde 1972 (Sáenz Peña: Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, 2013), 12–14.
12. Just a few years later, the Río de la Plata became a site of extreme violence. During Jorge Rafael Videla’s military regime (1976–1983), authorities “disappeared” individuals deemed enemies of the state by kidnapping and drugging them before throwing them out of airplanes into the river. On attempts at memorialization, see Janet A. Kamien, “Sites of Memory: Argentina,” Curator: The Museum Journal 55, no. 3 (2012): 267–77.
13. Ana Longoni, “‘Vanguard’ and ‘Revolution’: Key Concepts in Argentine Art during the 1960s and 1970s,” in Arte y Revolución, ed. Corbeira Darío (Madrid: Documenta Magazines, 2007); and, Ana Longoni, “En medio del incendio: Violencias insurgentes en la obra de Horacio Zabala,” in Horacio Zabala, desde 1972. The artist Eduardo Favario went so far as to join the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary Army), a Communist guerilla group, and was killed by government forces in 1975.
14. Briana J. Smith, Free Berlin: Art, Urban Politics, and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 28.
15. “In den letzten Jahren sind eine Reihe großformatiger nahezu monochromer Bilder entstanden, die in ihrer meditativen, bisweilen auch düsteren Grundstimmung die stagnierende, geschlossene Gesellschaft spiegeln.” Eugen Blume, “Der Kunstarbeiter Robert Rehfeldt,” in Robert Rehfeldt: Malerei, Visuelle Poesie, Mail-Art, Grafik, Objekte, Video (Berlin: Galerie Vier und Galerie Zielke, 1991), 11.
16. Jürgen Weichardt has also observed that the production process itself was important to Rehfeldt, but pays less attention to broader currents of practice and social conditions. Jürgen Weichardt, “Unser Mann in Berlin,” in Robert Rehfeldt: Malerei, Visuelle Poesie, 20.
17. Hal Foster, Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 54–56.
18. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed. Maurice Dobb, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 206.
19. Although the source material remains unclear, the poster was likely used for an exhibition at the Leipziger Messe, which hosted trade fairs and other events, including presentations of books and other consumer items from the West. This keen observation was made by Lutz Wohlrab.
20. Andreas Glaeser, Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 149–50.
21. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (1969; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 126.
22. Christopher Banditt et al., eds., DDR im Plural: Ostdeutsche Vergangenheiten und ihre Gegenwart (Berlin: Metropol, 2023). For a valuable account of artists working in the 1980s, see Sara Blaylock, Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022).
23. “Die Demokratie hat in der BRD keine Wurzeln.” Heiner Müller, “Nicht Einheit, sonder Differenz,” in “Für alle reicht es nicht”: Texte zum Kapitalismus, ed. Helen Müller and Clemens Pornschlegel (1989; 4th ed., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2022), 178.

Biographies

Robert Rehfeldt (1931, Stargard – 1993, Berlin) was a central figure of experimental art in East Germany and a pioneer of the international Mail Art movement behind the Iron Curtain.

He graduated in 1953 from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Berlin in West Berlin. While working as a freelance graphic artist and press illustrator, he continued to develop his own artistic practice. Encounters with artists such as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Alexander Camaro shaped his understanding of art as an open, experimental act rather than an ideological tool. This foundation proved crucial after the political climate in East Germany grew increasingly restrictive.

From 1963 onward, Rehfeldt was active in East Berlin’s experimental art circles and became a member of the Association of Fine Artists of the GDR. As cultural exchange with the West tightened after the closure of the borders, artistic production became more constrained. In response, Rehfeldt developed what he called “Kontakt-Kunst” (contact art), producing works in his basement studio in Berlin-Pankow and sending them abroad via post. He famously coined the phrase: “Dada is dead, contact art is living in your mailbox.”

In the early 1970s, through contact with Klaus Groh, Rehfeldt became deeply involved in the international Mail Art network. His studio evolved into an informal information hub for Western art developments, providing rare insight for East German artists. He corresponded with major international figures including Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Robert Filliou, Horst Tress, and Dick Higgins.

Rehfeldt also built strong connections with artists in socialist countries, especially Poland and Hungary, and collected key postwar publications that influenced his collages. After an early realist phase marked by metaphysical elements under the influence of his friend Ernst Schröder, he began experimenting across styles—working abstractly and figuratively, as a pop artist, assembler, installer, activist, and filmmaker. Using a Super 8 camera, he secretly documented performances, exhibitions, travels, and daily life, often pairing the footage with sound collages made from radio recordings, which he described as “vocal/melodic audio-tape letters from East to West.”

In 1975, on the occasion of his exhibition at Galeria Teatru Studio in Warsaw, he invited artists worldwide to design postcards, creating what became the first

Mail Art exhibition initiated from the GDR. This project inspired subsequent landmark exhibitions at the Arkade Gallery (1978) and Jürgen Schweinebraden’s EP Gallery (1979) in East Berlin. In 1986 he organized the Berlin meeting of the first “Decentralized International Mail-Art Congress.”

After German reunification, Rehfeldt presented his work and a retrospective of his 1975 Mail Art project at Berlin’s Ephraim Palace in 1991. He died on 28 September 1993 following a medical operation in Berlin. His work has since appeared in numerous posthumous exhibitions, including a 2008 retrospective at the Parterre Gallery in Berlin.

Christopher Williams-Wynn is a historian and theorist of modern and contemporary art. Currently an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, he examines how media have been used to explore the epistemological claims, political consequences, and aesthetic implications of disciplinary knowledge and practice. He received his PhD in art history from Harvard University, and his writing has appeared in Art Journal, Grey Room, and The Art Bulletin, among other venues.

Horacio Zabala (1943, Buenos Aires) is an Argentinian conceptual artist and architect known for his politically charged and intellectually rigorous work. Emerging in the late 1960s, he became associated with avant-garde movements that challenged authoritarianism and traditional art institutions in Argentina and across Latin America. His practice spanned drawing, cartography, mail art, and installation, often using maps and architectural plans to question borders, power structures, and systems of control. Zabala’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Biennale, cementing his influence within global conceptual art.