Obituary for Helmut Lohr 1955 to 2010

I happened just to read on Facebook that Helmut Lohr, a German collage artist, has died. He passed on Christmas Day this year, age 55. I googled him immediately and found this link from 1995 on the New York Times about his book arts, which he practiced at the time between his homes of New York and Dusseldorf.

However it was much later – 2007 – and in Santa Fe, that I became personally aware of his work, because in the first issue of Trend magazine that I edited, Nancy Zimmerman penned a profile about the man living in spare solitude on Glorieta Mesa, when not traveling internationally to remediate sick building syndrome he believed caused by low-frequency electro-magnetism.

We showed in the photographs some of his deconstructed musical scores, text on lead that he engraved, and his bedroom – bathroom in which the spartan white bed linens and modern porcelains (also all white) were offset by four very skinny black letters, ZEIT, stenciled on the wall. The word usually means time (but also tense or tide, period or age).

He had been a fashion model and a style icon as well as an artist. Lohrs untimely passing deserves marking out and his work and times, especially so, for remembrance. Cyndi Conn of Launch Projects remembered her “long and tender friendship” with Lohr on her blog this morning, which also captures some sentiments from other Santa Fe artists and writers on Lohr.

(above image: “Winter Solstice” by Helmut Lohr)