Lore Bert's vocabulary of forms is very diverse. In addition to constructive forms, geometry, architectural elements, ornaments and letters, numbers have played an important role in her oeuvre since 1988. Her first visit to the Orient played an important role in this, as she reports in her recently published biographical work Walking through a Life:
I fell in love with the oriental numbers as soon as I first saw them during my first visit in Cairo. Everytime we used a taxi, I saw the licence plates of the other cars, lettered part in Arab, part in oriental. I wanted to use this beautiful calligraphy, which meant nothing, in my works. Then I created banner works on which I mounted small packs of Japanese paper filled with cotton. Onto those packs I glued my oriental numbers, which were cut out of Nepalese papers themselves.
Lore Bert stayed true to these forms. They run through her work like a thread up to the latest creations of the year 2021. On the occasion of her 85th birthday, she shows the environment Numbers in Light featuring eight oriental neon numbers in the Cadoro – Center for Art and Science in Mainz-Hechtsheim as part of the exhibition Traces of Memory - Signs of the Present Traces of Remembrance – Signs of the Present. Transparent works with related shapes flanked the installation in the exhibition space.
The renowned art historian Dr. Karin von Maur, who Lore Bert enjoys in particular, wrote in a catalog contribution to the important exhibition Magic of Numbers in 1997 in Stuttgart about the works presented by the Mainz-based paper artist:
Some examples, like the works of Lore Bert, reflect preoccupation with the signlike character of numbers by using the example of modern Egyptian number signs, which allow the presentation of high numbers with less signs.
The film that we are presenting to you this week introduces this fascinating and yet less-known group of works. As usual, Dr. Dorothea van der Koelen introduces the viewer into the subject in an art-historical as well as entertaining way.
