For the month following the opening of his work Undertone, which was staged as part of the exhibition Listen Hear: The Art of Sound, Moritz Fehr stayed on at the Museum. He spent his residency working, participating in public programs, and traveling to various cities in the U.S. He was part of a panel on sound art with fellow Listen Hear artists David Grubbs and Elisa Hamilton, as well as with local musician and writer Damon Krukowski. On the panel, Fehr discussed how he was inspired to create Undertone. He explained how he recast 17th century music for a contemporary audience, and described the space for him between the absence of the stolen Vermeer and the presence of sound in his work.
In a visit to the conservation department, Fehr was able to get a close-up look at several pieces from the Raphael Room Restoration Project, especially a rare fourteen-string guitar called a chitarra battenete. He was also given a showing of the Raphael portrait of Count Tommaso Inghirami, 1515-16, with the work’s vibrant reds seen under the Conservation lights.
Moritz Fehr (b.1981, based in Berlin) works in sound, experimental film, and photography. His studies of Media Arts at Bauhaus-University Weimar, Germany, and Tokyo National University of the Arts, Japan, were followed by a practice-based Ph.D. in Fine Arts at Bauhaus University and at the Studio for Electroacoustic Composition (SeaM) at Franz-Liszt Academy, Weimar. He received scholarships from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), Bauhaus Research School Weimar, and the State of Thuringia, Germany. His projects have been presented at exhibitions, screenings, and festivals around the world including at the Goethe Institute Lagos, Nigeria; Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin; the Velaslavasay Panorama in LA; the Jerusalem Panorama Altoetting, Germany; and the Tieranatomisches Theater, Berlin.