Basic Info
Name: Manfred Mohr
Date of Birth: June 8, 1938
Country of Origin: DE
Website: http://www.emohr.com/
Gallery Representation: bitforms gallery - Steve Sacks - NYC
Galerie Mueller-Roth, Christine Mueller-Roth, Stuttgart Germany
DAM Gallery, Wolf Lieser, Berlin Germany
Gallery Charlot, Valerie Hasson-Benillouche, Paris
Description
Manfred Mohr is a pioneering digital and algorithmic artist whose work explores mathematical rules and computer programming to create precise geometric compositions of ever-increasing complexity. Born in 1938 in Pforzheim, Germany, Mohr trained as a goldsmith before establishing himself as an action painter and jazz musician in the 1960s. He co-founded a jazz club and played tenor saxophone and oboe in local groups, developing a deep knowledge of music theory that would profoundly influence his later practice.
In 1963, Mohr moved to Paris to study lithography at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he continued his artistic evolution from gestural abstraction toward geometric experiments incorporating hard-edge theory and a black-and-white geometric pictorial language. His artistic thinking was radically transformed after discovering philosopher Max Bense’s information aesthetics, which redefined art as a science of information, logic, and systems rather than purely emotional expression. Bense’s writings provided Mohr with a theoretical framework to approach art through algorithmic logic and mathematical structures, setting the stage for his pioneering shift from abstract expressionism to computer-generated algorithmic geometry.
Encouraged by computer music composer Pierre Barbaud, whom he met in 1967, Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969. His early roots as a jazz musician shaped his artistic vision fundamentally: his practical knowledge of rhythm, counterpoint, and harmony provided a framework for understanding structure and repetition that informed his transition to a calculated, system-driven art form. Much like a jazz composition balances rules with creative freedom, Mohr’s algorithmic works reflect a disciplined interplay between control and chance, rhythm and variation, infusing his digital creations with a sense of flow and complexity that parallels harmonic progressions and melodic interplay.
Mohr’s technical process was shaped by the demands and limitations of early computer technology. In the late 1960s and 1970s, he worked on large mainframe computers, programming through punch cards—a meticulous, exacting method that required careful planning since errors meant restarting the entire process. The computer plotter acted as his brush, physically rendering the output of his algorithms with precision and clarity. This relationship between artist, machine, and code created a unique discipline in his practice, emphasizing systematization and exactitude. The constraints and possibilities of these early technologies shaped Mohr’s aesthetic, producing crisp geometric patterns born from coded logic.
His practice is characterized by complex series of lines and forms with clear and methodical underlying structures, created from algorithms that describe defined systems executed using pseudo-random numbers as the values of structural parameters. Mohr has extensively explored the multidimensional cube as a source of visual complexity, utilizing fractured projections of n-dimensional hypercubes. His systematic explorations of shape have been compared to Josef Albers’ visual research on color.
In 1971, Mohr presented Computer Graphics – Une Esthétique Programmée at the ARC, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris—one of the earliest solo museum exhibitions dedicated entirely to computer-generated art. By the early 1980s, he had relocated from Paris to New York, where he continues to work. Mohr’s work was among the first computer art to be collected by museums and is now held internationally in collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Whitney Museum, New York; Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich; M+ Hong Kong; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and institutions from Tel Aviv to Berlin and across the United States.
He has had numerous solo exhibitions and retrospectives dedicated to his work in museums and galleries internationally, as well as participating in countless group shows at venues including MoMA, New York; MoCA, Los Angeles; and Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, Madrid. His contributions to algorithmic systems and generative abstraction have been recognized through several honors, including the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica and the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art in 2013, along with other artistic awards and fellowships in the U.S. and Germany.
Recently, Mohr has continued to develop programs and algorithms that revisit his older code in new ways, demonstrating his ongoing commitment to exploring the creative potential inherent in computational art.
