Adelhyd van Bender / HOT STUFF

Extended Exhibition Opening:
Friday, June 18, 6 – 9 pm
Saturday, June 19, 11 – 6 pm

Adelhyd van Bender was born as Harald Friedrich Bender in the German town of Bruchsal in 1950. At 15 he runs away to the industrial city of Ludwigshafen, where he lives in a juvenile home. 

Three years later and with a completed apprenticeship as an electrician, he moves to Berlin where he enrols in night school in 1974 to complete his secondary education and is subsequently admitted to the HdK (Berlin University of Arts). In 1976, he is expelled after a persisting dispute with the academic administration. Bender travels to England in pursuit of his ancestry. He now goes by the name of Adelhyd van Bender. Bender returns to Berlin in 1977 and intensifies his artistic activity: over a decade he draws and paints with tars, oil paints, chemicals and solvents on wood and cardboard. A fire set off by combustible materials stored in his apartment destroys part of his work in 1987, yet the scope of Bender’s oeuvre continues to expand and by 1999, a large part of the oeuvre is transferred to the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg. By this time Adelhyd van Bender has radically turned to a repetitive technique of incessant drawing, photocopying and reworking his paper sheets. Adelhyd van Bender dies on April 2, 2014 in Berlin. 

Van Bender was exhibited at the Fundação de Serralves in Porto in the group show Under the Clouds: From Paranoia to the Digital Sublime (curated by Joao Ribas) in 2015, at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and at Malmö Konsthall in the exhibition SPEED and SPEED 2 and at La Casa Encendida in Madrid in the group show El Ojo Eléctrico in 2019. His works were recently shown at Prinzhorn Sammlung, Heidelberg and Stadtgalerie Bern.

Antonia Gaeta (Italy, 1978) has a degree in Conservation of Cultural Heritage/ Contemporary Art from the University of Bologna, a Master in Curatorial Studies from FBAUL, University of Lisbon and a PhD in Contemporary Art from Colégio das Artes, University of Coimbra. She has developed research and exhibition projects with various artistic institutions in Portugal and abroad and has texts published in art catalogs, magazines and exhibition programs. She coordinated Portuguese official representation in the Biennale di Venezia (2009 and 2011) and São Paulo (2008 and 2010) for the Directorate-General for the Arts, Portuguese Ministry of Culture. In 2015 she worked as deputy curator at the Angola Pavilion at the 56th Biennale di Venezia. In the same year she started to developed curatorial projects for the Treger Saint Silvestre collection. Currently she directs the art space VERÃO in Lisbon.