Melvin Edwards: Some Bright Morning

Curatorial team: Luise von Nobbe and Moritz Wesseler

Under the title Some Bright Morning, the Fridericianum is presenting the first extensive solo exhibition by Melvin Edwards at a European institution. Featuring over 50 works, the show offers the opportunity to get to know the diverse abstract language of form of this sculptor, installation artist, and draftsman.

With a forward-looking approach to the questions, practices, and forms of modernism, Melvin Edwards established a body of work in the early 1960s that captivates with its great individuality and rigor. His oeuvre includes wall-mounted reliefs—the Lynch Fragments—barbed wire installations, freestanding sculptures, and works on paper. Although the works of Edwards, born in Houston, Texas, in 1937, are sited in the realm of abstraction, they allude to tangible points of reference. They evoke thoughts, feelings, and images that are linked to that historical context of the United States of America, from which the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s emerged. Edwards’s works can therefore be read as an expression of a political engagement—a protest against racial injustice that has not lost its urgency in the present day and one that, for the artist, can be transposed onto other parts of the world, including different regions of Africa and Central and South America.

The exhibition at the Fridericianum is being conceived in cooperation with Kunsthalle Bern and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, with each of the two venues presenting different tributes to Edwards’s work in 2025 and 2026.

Some Bright Morning is being generously supported by the Stiftung Stark für Gegenwartskunst, the Hessian Cultural Foundation, and the Rudolf Augstein Stiftung. Media partner of the show is Spike Art Magazine.