Piercing the Iron Curtain with the “Art of Contact”: Robert Rehfeldt and the Avant-Garde Power of Mail at ChertLüdde
Is it possible to weave an invisible avant-garde network stretching across the entire world from a basement in Pankow, within the suffocating and surveilled political climate of East Germany? For Robert Rehfeldt, who roamed fearlessly between disciplines from painting to performance, typewriter drafts to installation, this was a necessity. Berlin’s ChertLüdde gallery space plays host to this most extraordinary, uncontainable experimental genius of the Eastern Bloc. We bring into our radar the exhibition Mail Message from my Studio, enriched by art historian Christopher Williams-Wynn’s fresh academic reading.
In 1977, Robert Rehfeldt summarized the philosophy of his art practice with these words:
“If it wants to achieve a broad impact, art must play all registers from traditional painting to avant-garde experimentation.”
Living as if to validate Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ maxim, “In a communist society there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other activities,” Rehfeldt was a boundary violator who disregarded borders, censorship, and genres.
Conceptualized in parallel with the artist’s monumental museum exhibition An Opera Out of Time at Hamburger Bahnhof (which concluded on May 31, 2026), this gallery presentation collides his two eternal practices: international networks that fit into mailboxes and monumental paintings produced in the privacy of the studio.
Part 1: Mail Art, “Contart,” and Sardonic Salutes to the Stasi
Born in 1931, Rehfeldt returned to the Soviet Occupation Zone of Berlin in 1946 following World War II. After receiving art education in West Berlin, he crossed over to the East, turning Pankow into his base of operations for forty years. The international Mail Art (Posta Sanatı) network he joined in the early 1970s was the singular way for him to bypass state censorship and travel bans. Rehfeldt transformed mail into a democratic, museum-free display area with the postcards, photocopies, rubber stamp prints, and small objects he produced. In his words: “Dada is dead, contact art lives in your mailbox.” He addressed the officers of the Stasi—the famous East German Secret Service that read his letters line by line—and his acquaintances with an ironic wit. He openly mocked state control by circulating postcards stamped with “Denken Sie jetzt bitte nicht an mich” (Please do not think of me right now).
Part 2: The East Berlin – Buenos Aires Axis and “Art as a Prison”
One of the most exciting layers of the exhibition extends back to the famous 1975 exhibition project that Rehfeldt realized in Warsaw together with his life partner and artistic collaborator Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. While Ruth adorned the gallery walls with her iconic typewritings—works woven with typewriter characters—Robert formed a striking partnership via mail with the Argentine conceptual artist and architect Horacio Zabala.
Living in Buenos Aires, where military dictatorship and political violence were escalating, Zabala designed a handwritten poster, wrote “Contemporary Art is a Prison” upon it, and mailed it to East Berlin. Rehfeldt stamped this poster with his famous political slogan: “Venceremos Solidarios”.
The exhibition also features Zabala’s uncanny Anteproyectos de arquitectura carcelaria (Drafts for Political Prisoner Cells) series, where he responded to the military regime’s brutality through his architectural training, arguing that even art production could be a space of isolation. Zabala’s official “Censurado” stamps struck upon the canvases and Rehfeldt’s experience with censorship in the GDR (DDR) achieve a flawless totalitarian synchronization within the gallery space.
Part 3: The Berlin Wall Seeping into Canvases and the “No” Manifesto
That collective energy that Rehfeldt dispersed outward through Mail Art turned into dark, melancholic, and layered paintings when he retreated into his studio in the 1980s. Reminiscent of Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut (Raw Art) tradition and gaining sculptural volumes through gesso and thick impasto techniques, these canvases function as visual residues of the GDR’s static, closed social structure.
The thick white paint strips on some of the artist’s untitled abstract canvases bring to mind the interior surface of the Berlin Wall, which was painted a brilliant white to render escape attempts visible. It should not be forgotten that Rehfeldt’s studio in Pankow was located just 2.2 kilometers away from the Berlin Wall. In his 1982 painting Zeichenbild, the artist, crushing the smooth surface of an advertisement poster with matrix pixels, scrapes through the rigid paint layers to extract a clear word: “NO”. This is the collision of the public sphere’s propaganda language with the artist’s private scream.
Art, In Spite of Everything…
On the eve of October 3, 1990, when the two Germanys officially reunited, under the shadow of the crowds waving flags with nationalist sentiments and the fireworks over the Reichstag, Robert Rehfeldt left a secret warning painting upon his canvas by inverting the imperial-era colors: a visionary danger signal against rising xenophobia and false illusions of harmony.
Opening in Berlin more than thirty years after his death in 1993, this exhibition whispers the artist’s most timeless and resilient motto into our ears: “Kunst ist wenn sie trotzdem entsteht” (Art is when it happens anyway). A memory stop on the Schöneberg route until the end of July that absolutely should not be missed to breathe in the mailboxes and the hidden history beneath the painting.
Exhibition Details:
- Exhibition: Mail Message from my Studio
- Artists: Robert Rehfeldt (in collaboration with Horacio Zabala and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt)
- Academic Contribution / Text: Christopher Williams-Wynn
- Venue: ChertLüdde (Hauptstraße 18, Berlin, Germany)
- Dates: May 2, 2026 – July 25, 2026 (Now open)
