Excerpt from a diary entry by the artist Reiner Strub about the impact of Herrfurth's collages in 1969. Strub and Herrfurth met while studying art together in Berlin, shared a love of travel and Greece, and were friends for decades: "...But first, the week in Berlin, which thoroughly shook me up and stirred me. For the first time since that Jasper Johns exhibition in Bern, I saw original works from the Pop Art movement, etc. It's delightful how all the rank and file have suddenly jumped on the bandwagon and are swimming along. Almost nowhere is there anything of truly convincing quality. Even an elaborate exhibition by English artists had very little that I paused to look at." "Mini-art leaves me particularly cold." All this would probably be without consequence were it not for, yes, were it not for Karl-Heinz's new paintings. He has switched to a more structured painting style, and in working with collages—more like montages—made from color photographic magazine advertisements, he has discovered a disturbing objectivity, which he now paints on 100 x 200 cm canvases: bandaged body parts, nudes in a car in nonsensical poses. Never faces, hands, or feet. But it is, of course, the execution that is astonishing." Reiner Strub, 1969

In 1975, the artist Gertrud Sentke commented on Herrfurth's painting "The Giver," which was selected as the cover image for the 1975 art calendar of the Workers' Welfare Association: "...For some years now, Karl-Heinz Herrfurth's central theme has been 'man' in an environment unsuited to him. Through mechanization in manufacturing, the worker becomes alienated from himself and is reduced to a mere assistant, or the employee is isolated in the monotonous 'assignment' role as a controlling 'giver' (as in the image on the reverse). Uncomfortable and internally oppressive situations for urban and industrialized people, for people in civilization in general, are arising all over the world in our time." Consumers and manufacturers, themselves co-consumers of technologically advanced goods, appear underutilized as human beings, but rather "mechanized" within their own work processes. This is the problem that K.-H. Herrfurth addresses through his visual art. Through a coolly objective representation of objects and painting technique, the artist elucidates, among other things, the spatial and storage situations, the gleaming machinery in the rows or individual pieces of equipment, and their seductively cold aesthetic. He makes the human being appear larger than life within this gridded machinery, as the living, vital object of reality, and through visually exaggerated arm and hand gestures, he makes the mechanical nature of their daily work recognizable. The discrepancy between human being and enterprise, human being and mechanization, becomes obvious in these works by Karl-Heinz Herrfurth. (Gertrud Sentke, 1975)

Karl-Heinz Herrfurth, from the lecture at the University of the Arts in 1994: “Thinking in Images” Another game! “The press release from the University of the Arts regarding the lecture series ‘Thinking in Images’ states: It is by no means a given that visual artists—even when they teach art—talk about their own work. This certainly applies to me as well, and it would be a distressing prospect for me to have to discuss the artist’s uniquely established and immutable viewpoints, against which their art can be measured and which unmistakably describe their artistic personality with its idiosyncrasies. That wouldn’t suit me. I prefer to follow a motto by O’Neill: ‘He who commits himself to something ceases to evolve.’ Alternatively, one can refer to the role models and examples, the ancestors, friends, and acquaintances from art history, cite their works, and call upon them as experts on one’s own work. I considered this possibility but didn’t get very far.” I was thinking, for example, of Leonardo da Vinci's famous figure based on Vitruvius: man in the world, man as the measure of all things. While this is a recognized classical viewpoint, mine was probably only valid on August 25, 1993, as an excerpt from a sketchbook from the afternoon of that day. I don't want to pursue this line of comparison, but I will quote my sources later. Characteristic, and not coincidental, for every artist is the visual medium with which they can express themselves effectively, at least temporarily, and the project, the field of work in which they learn to navigate. Whether such fields of work are bound by time, subject to contemporary tastes, fashions, or trends, how such fields of work, in which the aforementioned viewpoints might be found, emerge, develop, expand, but also dry up, are abandoned in order to explore adjacent areas—this has always aroused my curiosity. This is almost an art historical topic, not without considering the biographies of artists, which often reveal how artistic concepts can emerge from initial, tentative ideas and chance occurrences, premonitions and experimental attempts. I will tell you a very personal story, discuss one of my areas of work, drawing, and talk about my everyday work, the "craft" (it is also a craft of the head, eyes, heart, and gut) in a time when craftsmanship has long since entered the realm of art. For years, I painted almost exclusively; drawings existed as sketches or drafts, notes, and image analyses. The subjects were almost always figures, or rather, figurations, and specific figurations as a visually clear, colorfully and/or linearly structured (structured) coherence of forms within the picture plane, that is, in the picture ground. Figurations, therefore, can be derived not only from the experience and perception of human or animal figures, but also from the contemplation of other aspects of the world, including traditional motifs in painting, landscape, still life, architecture, and the technological environment, and they need not be limited to the external world. During study trips to the far south of Greece, I could only paint in the shaded studio and only during the less bright times of day, in the morning and late afternoon. The overly bright, shimmering, all-encompassing sunlight outdoors hardly allows for working with color or making appropriate color choices, but it does allow for drawing, which has become increasingly important to me here in Germany as well, because I wanted to conceive of painting only on the basis of a pictorial idea, form, and its invention. Unfortunately, during one of these summer working trips, my supply of drawing and painting paper ran out very quickly. The village shop had nothing suitable, and a trip to the nearest town to buy more proved fruitless. In my desperation, I resorted to old letters, school notebooks, and journals found in a chest in the house—pages covered in writing but in a very fragile state. In my initial experiments with these materials, the handwritten notes were covered over with paint. In doing so, I arguably avoided the challenge of understanding these materials, with their entries, as a source of historical information and their graphic and painterly structures as a design guideline. Its value was to be understood in the following works. […] In my imaginative associations, which exerted a great influence on my drawing, I recalled a description of the Athenian Agora that I had once read in passing and rediscovered the passage in Robert Payne's book "The Greeks," 1964. It should be noted that Anglo-Saxon archaeologists and historians are very concerned with elucidating the living conditions of the people, the trades and commerce of ordinary people, and their customs and traditions. Payne writes about the Agora in Athens after the Persian Wars, in a state of reconstruction following the city's near-total destruction: "All accounts agree that there was one place which surpassed all others in noise. It was the agora, where the Athenians held their daily market until noon. […] But even more audible than the fishmongers and the myrtle sellers was the terrible voice of the herald, who used to order the clearing of the marketplace, so that everyone could attend the popular assembly on the opposite hill, the Pnyx. Then the long rope, dipped in fresh red paint, was swept back and forth across the marketplace. Anyone found in the streets of Athens with a red paint stain on them was fined for being absent from the popular assembly (Payne 271). A fascinating glimpse into the richness of life, full of images and inspiration. The red paint stains were like an echo of my previous efforts in painting to detach color from its function as the color of bodies, things, and objects, to rediscover it as a color mark, a color sign, a marker, as the color of pain and joy, not as illumination or lighting, but as a radiating light emitted in a point or over a surface. Returning to my drawing grounds: The ledgers, letters, envelopes, and school notebooks were followed by inventory books, autograph albums, craftsmen's workbooks, and completed forms, which I have here I found them at secondhand shops. Because some were in a state of disrepair, I had to mount the pages on paper, which allowed me to arrange them in series and series. Their visual and material properties included: various shapes and formats, different surface textures, horizontal and vertical lines, grids, lettering such as letters, numbers, headings, lines, and signatures, different arrangements of these graphic elements, condensations through overwriting and accumulation, crossed-out and erased material, omissions and missing sections, pasted-on and repaired items, revenue stamps, and, on the covers, sealing wax, postage stamps, and postmarks, dog-eared pages, creases, tears, rips, abrasions from intensive use, water stains, rust and mildew stains, holes and other damage from worm and insect infestation, discoloration, and yellowing. Within these partly standardized (lines, writing, numbers), partly random (stains, tears, discolorations), The appeal of these materials, and also the obligation to them, lay bare, inspired, and playfully inscribe my figurations, to look into them and imagine within them, to imprint my own stories on the given narratives, to allow the found elements to contribute as the abundance of the picture plane or to express themselves in small quantities as "background noise." The expression of the drawings therefore always lies between the poles of abundance, being filled, being occupied, and scarcity, brevity, fragment. There are many individual drawings. However, the dense sequence of works leads to variants and variations, groups and series; the inventions complement each other successively and side by side, circling their pictorial themes. During a longer working phase of drawing, the drawings spread across the studio floors, table, and chairs, covering the walls, complementing each other to form series of similar pictorial concepts and similar working methods. One drawing elicits the next, and the artist's awareness sharpens amidst this accumulation of images, for he is always drawing himself, his premonitions, his desires and feelings, comparing, examining, and allowing himself to be surprised. This inner monologue leads to a compelling realization that the discovered signs belong to the ever-flowing stream of drawings, etchings, tattoos, carvings, and so on—billions, probably, many lost—made since the beginning of human history, resembling them, complementing them, related to them, or even taking their place, polemically and caricaturing them. The artist's solitude is over. On the banks of this river sit not only contemporaries, but also like-minded individuals from other eras and regions: over there, the monk from a monastic scriptorium, occupied with his grotesques in the margin of a codex page; opposite, a tribe refreshing the white images of their ancestral spirits on the overhanging cliff with lime; here, the woman imprinting simple drawings onto her hand-shaped clay pot with a piece of wood; next to her, the sign painter composing a milliner's shop sign from text and image; nearby, a child playfully absorbed in creating a stick figure. Please don't consider my lists exaggerated. They sketch my awareness of long-lasting trends in art and cultural history, my awareness of tradition. Those who associate the term "tradition" with "stale, worn out, reactionary, conservative" seem to forget that all artistic inventions have roots stretching far back in time, and that tradition should therefore be seen as a positive thing. T.S. Eliot observes: "Nothing that is not fundamentally traditional can truly be new." Or the French philosopher Jean Jaurès: "Tradition is not about preserving ashes, but about keeping a flame burning." Another important source on this topic of "arts and traditions" is the work of Walter Benjamin, which I highly recommend. I have spoken about my fascination with this topic and will now expand on my observations. An ancient tale tells us the following about the origin of drawing: A young woman must bid a painful farewell to her lover, who is going off to war. To remember his form, she traces the outline of his shadow on the wall where they are standing with a piece of charcoal before he leaves. Now, the outline of a shadow falling obliquely on a wall, which she preserved, could not have borne much resemblance to her beloved, and yet it must have sufficed to give her longing and memory a sense of grounding. Reflecting on this event, three characteristics strike me: 1. Drawing harbors the deepest feelings of soul and body. 2. It is spontaneous and requires only the most basic, elemental means. 3. It does not depict, but seeks images. Undoubtedly, this outline on the wall is an image. If I exclude all drawings concerned with representing the objective world—the drawings of designers, architects, and engineers, the plans, scaled drawings, construction drawings, diagrams, measurement sheets, as well as the working drawings and sketches for clarifying the artistic projects of visual artists, which do not actually have a pictorial character—then I find my three characteristics reflected in the drawings of artists throughout history. I also find them reflected in the statements of artists and connoisseurs, which I cannot formulate more aptly. Henri Matisse: “I have never considered drawing as a particular exercise in skill, but always as a means of conveying greater simplicity. Expression from its origin, which, without heaviness, enters directly into the mind of the viewer.” Henri Matisse: “In drawing, the essence of the line alone must cope with the great complex of the individual and the universal, the accidental and the momentary, the material, the chromatic, and the spatial. It must convey all essential units, formal components, and formal characteristics. It can only outline bodies and provide them with internal detail. Omission becomes a requirement. In the fluid selection of the essential, which contains not only the appearance of reality but also the artist's experience, lies the free unfolding of all genius and the character of every artistic drawing.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (almost 200 years ago) on his Italian journey: “…What I haven't drawn, I haven't seen!” For Goethe, "not seen" also means "not experienced, not felt, not appropriated." I found many similar statements, and my notebook is filling up. These include remarks about the primacy of drawing over other visual media. Giacometti: "We must devote ourselves exclusively to drawing. If one has even a basic grasp of drawing, everything else becomes possible." Enzo Cucchi: "Either it's there immediately, or it has no eyes; then you throw it away or tear it up. A painting can always be reworked; the materials help you with that. A drawing, on the other hand, is difficult; it's like a living animal under the painter's hands." Pierre Bonnard: "Drawing is sensation, color is reason." Max Friedländer: "Drawing, to a greater degree than painting, is a choosing, deciding, omitting, a mental intervention; therefore, as an immediate, personal, intimate expression of individuality, it is invaluable." A summary of my insights (much drier than those I quoted) is as follows: Drawing is a spontaneous creative process using the most abstract of binding agents—the line, the scribble, the graphic mark—sparingly, but not impoverished. It can and should be fragmentary because drawing is the art of suggestion and abbreviation. The subject of drawing is always drawing itself, the act of recording the drawing process in its various stages as a process of movement, thought, and sensation. The physiogram (movement and grasping of lines, rewriting and defining) and the psychogram (imagination, image conception, and image search) are intertwined. The drawing material used is not the most important factor, although it does contribute its own characteristics. Thus, we can place a reed pen drawing by Rembrandt directly next to a pencil drawing by Picasso or a charcoal drawing by Matisse and immediately recognize, if we have the discerning eye, the high stature of the artists despite their differing temperaments and uses of media, and we recognize the intensity and clarity of their feelings and inventions. It is not the subject matter, but the way the image is conveyed that captivates us.” Karl-Heinz Herrfurth, lecture from February 3, 1994

Stefanie Heckmann on Herrfurth's works on old paper (in: Stefanie Heckmann, catalogue for the exhibition "Memory of Imagination", June 21 to July 13, 1996 at the Berlin University of the Arts, 1996): "Although Karl-Heinz Herrfurth deals exclusively with painting and drawing, the found object can be considered a mediating element that significantly shapes his work. His extensive collection of found objects, such as old tools, lamps, and indefinable wooden implements, some of which he has hung densely packed together on iron hooks along a rail, does not have an explicit status as a work of art, but can be regarded as a reservoir of ideas. Relationships are established between individual objects, which, removed from their original function, form groups purely on the basis of their external characteristics, their form as well as their materiality. These groups, like a new organism, develop a life of their own, the reflection of which—be it as motif or inspiration—is found in the drawings." The drawings themselves are always created on found paper, bearing traces of age and use. These frayed, sometimes written-on, yellowed sheets provide the basic tone, which is then carefully taken up. Forms emerge, hinting at objects, heads, and figures, composed of lines, curves, and splashes of color. The real tension lies primarily in the mediation of different levels of reality. The old papers, which serve as the supports for the drawings, tell their own stories, comparable to the found objects themselves, having already become history. As fragments of reality, they document a long-gone era, over which the reality of the drawing is superimposed. Lines and colors come together in a light-footed and playful way on a third level, in the free re-creation of reality with allusions to objects or the human figure. As with the found objects, the fragments are not subjected to "the master's hard hand" (Picasso), but rather they shine through, assert themselves, and correspond with the drawing they overwrite. Merleau-Ponty's statement, "Only the painter has the right to cast his gaze upon all things without being obliged to judge them," could also serve as a credo for Herrfurth's work. (Stefanie Heckmann, 1996)

Art historian Berd Ziegenrücker describes his visit to Herrfurth's studio in 2009: "Karl-Heinz Herrfurth's studio is located in a commercial courtyard not far from Ernst-Reuter-Platz in Berlin. Dieter Appelt works in the immediate vicinity. The studio is very meticulously maintained, and in addition to the many paintings, the African sculptures are particularly striking. Professor Herrfurth is still a 'painter' in the classical sense. He taught this subject at the Berlin University of the Arts. I had become aware of the artist through an impressive work at the Villa Oppenheim and wanted to learn more about him. This work consisted of approximately 50 to 60 overpainted texts and sequences of numbers from an old notebook. The staples had left traces of rust in some places. The texts and numbers had been written in pencil and pen. The pages were foxed and yellowed. The gaps were filled with figures, small pictures, and symbols in pencil and watercolor techniques." An entire wall in the exhibition was covered with these individually framed works. I thought more of Art Brut and Wölffli than of a painter living in Berlin. During a visit to his studio, Karl-Heinz Herrfurth told me the story. Notebooks from Greece: His late wife came from Greece. Her great-grandfather had gone to Alexandria as a young man and become very wealthy. He spent his later years in his home village, where he ran a small shop. This grandfather's notebooks had survived and served Herrfurth as models and inspiration for his idiosyncratic pictorial inventions. In this way, history and the present, stories and concreteness, reality and fantasy combine to form an unexpected new whole. Karl-Heinz Herrfurth's large and highly distinctive oeuvre ranges from Pop Art of the 1960s through a very unique surrealist phase to new collages. It was a very enjoyable afternoon." Bernd Ziegenrücker in his article for artelabonline.com from January 13, 2009 (accessed on May 19, 2023, at 8:07 a.m. at: www.artelabonline.com/articoli/view_article.php?id=3378)

In her foreword to the catalog "Karl-Heinz Herrfurth - The Solitude of the Draughtsman Is Over," the artist Anna Holldorf writes: "The title of this catalog alludes to two things: Firstly, it comes from Karl-Heinz Herrfurth's lecture in the lecture series 'Thinking in Pictures,' held in 1993/94 at the Berlin University of the Arts. Secondly, it refers to Herrfurth's reclusive life as an artist. As you can read for yourselves on the following pages, Karl-Heinz Herrfurth uses this quote to refer to his embeddedness in art and cultural history; it outlines his awareness of tradition. He continues: On the banks of this river sit not only contemporaries, but also like-minded individuals from other eras and regions." This awareness of tradition, and perhaps even a commitment to a living history of art, must have allowed the Berlin artist to feel completely at home and embedded in a tradition that enabled him to remain entirely removed from the capricious and ever-changing art world of the present day throughout his long artistic career. Karl-Heinz Herrfurth, born September 27, 1934, died November 12, 2015, taught as a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1974 to 2002, and this financial independence afforded him the freedom of artistic creation. This catalogue, which presents only a small selection of his master drawings, as I would call them, is a first step in paying KH Herrfurth the tribute he deserves as an artist. Master drawings, because they are timeless gems, wherever they may have originated. They sprang from the painter's artistic soul like the purest spring water. From Herrfurth's collection of handwritten quotations, I quote Willi Baumeister: "In any case, the artist must find his way to his sources. There he encounters his measure, what is appropriate for him." As a master student of Karl-Heinz Herrfurth, it is an honor for me to make a chronological cross-section of his vast collection of drawings accessible to the public. These drawings were created primarily between 1988 and 2000 on old papers (letters, notebooks). My studies with Herrfurth began around the same time as the creation of this collection (1988) and ended in 1994 with my master's degree, so I was able to attend Herrfurth's slide lecture from 1994 (see below). This lecture gave me a profound insight into and a lasting impression of the graphic work of the then 59-year-old artist and professor. The lecture text provides an exemplary insight into the work shown here and can therefore be read on the following, though not consecutive, pages. The publication of this catalogue was made possible through the agreement and consent, and not least through the collaboration, of the sons of Herrfurth, who provided me with trustworthy and dedicated support in its publication. – Anna Holldorf, April 25, 2016

The art historian Dr. In his review of lots 821 "Seat Belt" and 822 "Mechanics," Martin Schmidt writes the following about Karl-Heinz Herrfurth's paintings from the 1970s in the catalog "Contemporary Art" for the Villa Grisebach summer auction on June 2, 2023, in Berlin: "Karl-Heinz Herrfurth, later a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1974 to 2002, placed his unsettling painted collages, which deal with the progressive mechanization of the world and its effects on humanity, squarely in the midst of the expansion of social freedoms around 1970. The artist emphasizes the fragmentary nature of bodies, which, like relics of the human, protrude from the grasp of steel, chrome, and plastic, unable to escape technoid appropriation. These images, perhaps intensified by the Vietnam War, link the mechanical with oppression, coercion, and injury. They have a powerful effect." like memories of organic life, which cannot defend itself against cold rationality. With these paintings, Herrfurth makes a unique contribution to the figuration of the late 1960s and early 1970s, one that focuses on the Janus-faced nature of progress without resorting to simplistic agitation." Dr. Martin Schmidt, June 2023