Klaus Peter Dencker
Klaus Peter Dencker was born in 1941 in Lübeck/Germany. At university he studied German and Japanese literature. He earned a doctorate in Philosophy in 1970. He was Professor of Media-Theory and Media-Practice at the University of Trier 1985 - 2001 and, during the same period, was Executive Director at the Ministry of Culture in Hamburg.
He is a Filmmaker (more than 100 films for German Television) and Visual Poet (exhibiting and publishing internationally since 1970). Dencker did the first TV-film (ARD/HR) and the first German anthology (Textbilder - Visuelle Poesie international. DuMont,Köln) about Visual Poetry in 1972, and the very first international overview: Optische Poesie—von den prähistorischen Schriftzeichen bis zu den digitalen Experimenten der Gegenwart (Optical Poetry—from early pictorial inscriptions to present-day digital experiments). De Gruyter, Berlin/New York 2011.
His books include Klaus Peter Dencker, Visual Poetry 1: 1965 - 2005 (Weitra/ Austria 2005) and Klaus Peter Dencker, Visual Poetry 2: Works till 2015 (Weitra /Austria 2015).
About the images in Aleph Null
Klaus Peter Dencker is the visionary at the end of the rainbow, spinning it back to viewers who inhabit a black-and-white world. His collages almost invariably contain an abundance of blank space, because the universe is so constituted. This is in contrast to visual poets who lack ikebana [flower arrangement] training and its consequent sensitivity to the intricate relationship between substance and emptiness. While Dencker's pictures fruitfully mimic the visible world, they also uncannily evoke the invisible world. In my opinion, he is the most philosophical, esthetic and innovative visual poet of our times, maybe all time. After a half-century of masterpieces by dozens of artists in the concrete and visual poetry movements, Klaus Peter Dencker remains steadfastly as if he were a character in one of his own works, namely the wide-open eye atop a golden pyramid, winking at the world and all its folly.
John Solt
