Ruth Wolf-Freheldt, German Mail Artist with a Cult Following, Dies at 92

Ruth Wolf-Freheldt, whose typewritten pieces of mail art have developed a small but growing following among artists, particularly in Germany, has died at 92. Her death was announced on Tuesday by ChertLüdde, her German gallery.

Wolf-Freheldt received mainstream recognition in the past decade, years after she stopped producing art after she felt she had nothing more to say. She appeared in Documenta 14, the 2017 edition of the famed art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and won the Hannah Höch Prize in 2022. A 2023 retrospective at Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett museum earned her acclaim.

Most of her creations were decidedly lo-fi, taking the form of pieces of paper lined with arrays of typewritten text that she mailed out to her colleagues from her East Berlin studio. She called these pieces Kunstpostbriefe (art letters) and produced them using the Erika typewriter.

These works, which she also called “typewritings,” abstract individual words and phrases, repeating letters until they form shapes. The letters in the word “planet,” in one 1970s piece called Divided Planet, double and expand to form an orb. In another piece from the same era, titled Concrete Shoe, Cs, Os, and Ns encase a woman’s shoe.

At the time Wolf-Freheldt produced her typewritings, East Berlin was a part of the Eastern Bloc and was, as a result, subject to a repressive regime. Yet her mail art continued to flow far beyond the borders of East Germany, reaching people in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

She was born in Wurzen in 1932, and would go on to marry the artist Robert Rehfeldt. Wolf-Freheldt taught herself to become an artist and held a day job as an office manager. As critic Barbara Casavecchia pointed out in her text about Wolf-Freheldt for Documenta 14, the occupation of a typist was one typically held by women, which lent her art a new valence.

Wolf-Freheldt continued to make her typewritings until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. During the 1990s, finding that her art had effectively grown outmoded by the end of the Eastern Bloc, she ceased her practice altogether.

But in the 2010s, as critic Astrid Mania wrote in Artforum, “Wolf-Rehfeldt is now being discovered by a younger, international generation of curators and gallerists.” Artists, too, began to find out about Wolf-Reheldt. One was the Los Angeles–based David Horvitz, who researched in the artist’s archives, established a friendship with her, and even created an exhibition in 2022 about their bond.

In that show, Horvitz exhibited watercolors he had sent to Wolf-Reheldt. One read: “I send you the sea and it travels through other people’s hands.”