Ferdinand Kriwet

(born 1942, Düsseldorf – died 2018, Bremen) was a German multimedia artist belonging to the Düsseldorf neo-avant-garde scene and the International Concrete Poetry Movement. Beginning in the early 1960s, he engaged with phonetic, semantic and visual components of text. He experimented with the format of radio pieces in the spirit of the New Radio Play (Neues Hörspiel). His series Hörtexte (Radio Texts), produced for German public radio -stations, is a sound collage of edited sound bites taken from mass media broadcasts – political speeches, news, advertising slogans as well as prayers. In addition to audio works, Kriwet has created text discs (Sehtexte / Rundscheiben) and artist’s books, and dealt with film, performance media, installation and painting.

Kriwet’s artwork has been presented in many solo exhibitions, e.g., at the BQ in Berlin (2022, 2013), the Georg Kargl Fine Arts in Vienna (2017), the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2011), the Modern Institute in Glasgow (2008), as well as group exhibitions, e.g., the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin (2022–2023), the Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst in Bremen (2022), the Kunsthalle Wien (2020–2021), the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2018), the Badischer Kunstverein v Karlsruhe (2016), the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (2012) and MoMA in New York (2012).