On the death of Helke Bayrle: She was our secret university

For as long as we can remember, Helke and Thomas Bayrle's Frankfurt kitchen has been one of the informal centers of the German art world.

What a great place it was three decades ago!

Everyone was allowed to show up there and did, and they got Helke's legendary risotto and a glass of wine with it.

Artists of all generations were invited to join the discussion, as equals, there was no pomposity.

Dan Graham sat there with students from the Städelschule, and no one was surprised when Isa Genzken or Franz West suddenly turned up unannounced.

Late that night Kasper König came along and brought along Peter Cook and Dara Birnbaum or simply his neighbors and their children.

Frankfurt's Black Mountain College

Bayrle's kitchen was the most unpretentious art location imaginable - and yet an extraordinary forum in every sense of the word for discussions about art and everything that could have something to do with it.

This kitchen surpassed all the highly professional academic arenas we have been invited to over the years.

It was a place where knowledge from different worlds was exchanged (the Bayrles always said to cultivate a garden for poetry, music and art).

We once told Robert Rauschenberg about those magical kitchen moments and he said it reminded him of Black Mountain College - and yes, maybe it was this Frankfurt kitchen that came closest to the spirit of this legendary art school.

Helke Bayrle, born in Thorn, Poland, in 1941, has worked very closely with her husband, the artist Thomas Bayrle, since 1969.

She was a very special filmmaker.

Since the early 1990s she has been documenting the construction of exhibitions at the Portikus with her video camera.

The result is an unrivaled collection of artist portraits, with background materials and images from situations that viewers never normally see once the exhibition opens.

against forgetting

Many exhibitions are forgotten.

But Helke once said that it is important to remember, especially in an age with overwhelming amounts of information.

Her archive was also a protest against forgetting.

For more than two decades, she made these films with Korean artist Sunah Choi.

Helke's films went far beyond normal documentaries.

They are very personal, intimate observations of artist personalities and also of the process of making an exhibition.

If an artist doesn't want to be filmed, they accept that, Helke once said, but almost everyone wanted to be filmed, and so an infinitely rich, historically significant archive was created.

How should one describe the style of Helke's portraits?

She makes very emotional films and never knows what's going to happen, she once said, that makes her work exciting, that's all the fun.

We both became exhibition makers when we were young, but neither of us had been trained for it.

In a way, Helkes and Thomas's kitchen became our university, and the artists in their ever-growing archive – from Marlene Dumas and Wolfgang Tillmans to Yoko Ono and Matthew Barney – were the best tutors imaginable.

Above all, however, we are infinitely grateful to Helke, who was one of the most open and lovable people in the art world.

Daniel Birnbaum

is a former rector of the Städelschule and director of Acute Art.

is artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Translated from the English by

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