Lore Bert is awarded the Federal Cross of Merit

The Mainz-based paper artist Lore Bert – well known, of course, to art lovers and patrons of the Gallery Dr. Dorothea van der Koelen – will be honored in June 2026 with the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon for her lifelong dedication to the arts.

Lore Bert, born on July 2, 1936, in Gießen and raised in Darmstadt, studied painting in Berlin from 1953 to 1957 at the HfBK, the University of the Arts, under the sculptor Hans Uhlmann, who sparked her love of spatial art.

A defining feature of her artistic practice for more than four decades has been her use of Far Eastern papers from Japan, Nepal, Korea, and China, which often take on a spatial dimension. The collages, pictorial objects, banners, and sculptures she has created since the early 1980s – and, shortly thereafter, installations ranging from individual works to entire paper rooms and environments – demonstrate the artist’s interest in material and form, as well as in space and surroundings. Paper is her preferred medium.

With her 1996 exhibitions in Cairo (Egypt), additional materials such as brownish papyrus and bright 23-karat gold leaf were added to her palette of colors and materials. By the mid-1990s at the latest, light had also become one of her design elements. She created environments featuring neon lettering and neon tubes, and shortly thereafter in the form of oriental numerals and neon spheres, eventually evolving into entire light-filled spaces.

By 2026, more than 135 art spaces had been created in museums and public exhibition venues across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the United States, the Middle East, and Mexico. Often, the foundation was a ‘sea’ of folded paper, combined with various materials: light, inscribed spheres, mirror sculptures in the form of ‘Platonic solids’ – as seen at the 2013 Venice Biennale or the Busan National Museum in 2014 – or, as at the 2019 Venice Biennale, stelae made of dichroic glass.

To mark her 90th birthday, Lore Bert is now presenting her third biennial exhibition. Under the title Towards the Light, the artist will showcase a large-scale paper installation featuring neon elements at the Church of San Fantin (across from the Teatro La Fenice) from May 5 to October 22, 2026.

The overall project reveals another important aspect of Lore Bert’s work: light installations with neon tubes, which she has been developing since the 1990s. In the main nave, there are two paper circles made of folded sheets of paper – one featuring red neon elements in the form of quatrefoils, the other with turquoise-and-white alternating neon spheres arranged in a spiral. The third light work stands as a sculpture in the choir and displays ‘Oriental numbers’. In the flanking side aisles, there are four large-format pictorial objects that correspond thematically and chromatically.