Guillermo Deisler


Guillermo Deisler was a stage designer, visual poet and mail artist. In his country of birth, Chile, as well as during his long and difficult exile his rich and imaginative work constituted the centre of his life.

Life

Deisler was born in Santiago, Chile as the son of a family that had immigrated around 1900 from Prussia. He studied art and became, in 1967, a teacher of graphic art at the University of Chile in Antofagasta. When Pinochet came to power, he was arrested and sacked. With the help of friends, he was able to leave prison and go into exile in Europe. After staying in France for a year, he volunteered to work in the German Democratic Republic. From there, however, he was sent on to Bulgaria, where he and his family stayed for almost 12 years. In 1986, he was allowed to return to the German Democratic Republic, where he worked as a stage designer at the provincial theatre in Halle until his untimely death.

Work

Deisler has produced a large body of visual poetry and contributed to the movement of mail art. But most of this work, exhibited and published in the different countries of his exile, is little known and remains to be rediscovered. He is largely remembered as a promoter of his fellow artists. As early as 1963 to 1973 he published mimbre, a periodical of graphic arts and visual poetry, presenting the avantgarde of Latin American artists. In 1987, he started a similar project, this time of an international scope: the Peacedream project UNI/vers, publishing original mail art works from artists like Hans Braumüller, Theo Breuer, David Chikladze, Pedro-Juan Gutierrez, Joseph Huber, César Figueiredo, K. Takeishi-Tateno, Spencer Selby and many others. In 1990, just after the unification of Germany, he edited the anthology wortBILD, documenting avant-garde visual poetry in the now defunct German Democratic Republic.
Today his collection of more than 5,000 works of mail art is preserved in the archives of the Academy of the Arts, Berlin.

Selected exhibitions