Ilse Leda and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart met in Hanover in the 1920s and became a couple. As an avant-garde artistic duo, they dedicated themselves to Concrete Art, developing synergies in their concepts of body, movement, time, space, and image—Ilse Leda from the perspective of a dancer and choreographer, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart as a visual artist. They were inspired by the art movements of Modernism, Cubism, Dadaism, and the Bauhaus. With the founding of the Kestner Society in Hanover in 1916, largely through the work of Kurt Schwitters, an art scene emerged that vigorously challenged the bastions of bourgeois artistic understanding.

VG's concrete-constructivist visual language and Ilse Leda's abstract choreographic style were permeated by a feeling for life evoked by the Bauhaus philosophy of elemental clarity and concision for art and life. This creative period, lasting until the mid-1930s, was interrupted by their flight into exile in the Netherlands in 1938 (VG as a so-called "degenerate artist," Ilse Leda as a Jew). They did not return to Germany until 1954, when VG was appointed lecturer at the Ulm School of Design.

The performance Abstraction/Expression is a tribute to the artist couple.

The media of image, dance, and music enter into a dynamic interplay. An unusual 'pas de deux' emerges between the dancer Erneste Junge and the musician Willem Schulz, which, through the projection of selected images by Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart and photo collages by the photographer Maria Otte onto the performers' bodies, creates a fascinating spatial dimension and visual fragmentation.

Directed and technically overseen by Manfred Pomorin.

An event by the art.concrete.constructiv vordemberge-gildewart Foundation

Trust foundation of the citizens' foundation