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With an exhibition and a four-part series of talks, Künstlernachlässe Mannheim (Artists’ Legacies Mannheim) and PORT25 – Raum für Gegenwartskunst pay tribute to the Mannheim artist Franz Schömbs (1909 - 1976). The painter and film-maker worked extremely experimentally, was occasionally ahead of his time, and accordingly his works were often not as esteemed as they should be by the contemporary public. But Franz Schömbs is an exceptional artist! From the 1930s he examined the question of time, space and movement in the image, which ultimately led him to the motion picture, and he developed thoroughly avant-garde pictorial and presentation forms. For the art film Die Geburt des Lichts (The Birth of Light), in 1957 Schömbs moved from Mannheim to Munich, where Unda-Film gave him the opportunity to realise his ideas. Schömbs had designed a complex machine, the ‘Integrator’, through which he ran picture strips, painted on according to a precisely calculated score and cut out to resemble templates. By means of multiple exposures and reflections, ever-new colour and shape constellations arose, in which space and time conjoined in abstract colour harmony. Highly praised by the critics, this was also too challenging for the public. Schömbs’s films are presented alongside exemplary works at PORT25. In the accompanying series of talks, the subjects are the artist and his oeuvre (Silvia Köhler), his films in the context of the German experimental film (Thomas Worschech) as well as in the art-historical context (Prof. Dr. Henry Keazor) and the challenges posed by restoration and digitalisation (Lou Burkat).

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