on 15 december 2019 diet sayler celebrated his 80th birthday. the neues museum is taking this opportunity to pay tribute to the artist, awarded the grand cultural prize of the city of nuremberg in 2018, with a focused selection of works from five decades.
diet sayler was born in 1939 in timişoara, the center of the banat. at the end of the 1960s, there was a temporary cultural thaw in romania. at that time, the young artist made his first public appearance with other neo-avant-garde artists. back then, his art was still explicitly constructivist. in 1972, the artist turned his back on ceauşescu’s authoritarian regime emigrating to germany where he taught as a professor here at the local (nuremberg) academy of fine arts from 1992 to 2005.
with his exhibition series “konkret” sayler presented the different varieties of concrete and constructive art from 1980 to 1990 and made nuremberg a secret capital of these movements. diet sayler himself can be considered one of the most important concrete artists in europe. independence from all artistic and intellectual fashions still distinguishes the artist today. having suffered life under a dictatorship, art without freedom is unthinkable for diet sayler – in both the social and artistic sense. the artist is therefore one of the unorthodox exponents of concrete art. chance to him means an assurance against the lies brought about by any absolutization of a system.
neues museum, nurenberg
