Artistic Associate
Professorship of Graphic Design
Marienstraße 1a, Room 107
99423 Weimar
Phone: +49 (0) 36 43 / 58 33 00
E-Mail: frieder.oelze[at]uni-weimar.de
Office Hours: by appointment
Biography
Frieder Oelze is a graphic designer and artist who has been working as an artistic staff member at the Faculty of Art and Design since 2026. After graduating from the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, he earned his Master’s degree in Freie Kunst at the HFBK Hamburg.
Prior to joining DIE ZEIT, ZEIT Magazin, and ZEIT Campus as a designer in 2022, he worked as a freelance art director in the fields of music, culture, and fashion, developing publications and comprehensive systems that he largely oversaw and refined over extended periods.
Influenced by his artistic training, Frieder Oelze moves between art, design, and technology.He seeks to do more than merely represent content in his work and understands graphic design as a form of translation – an open-ended process that, through interpretation and mediation, can contribute significantly to experiencing and understanding the world. This requires a constant engagement with design methods and tools in addition to an interest in experimentation and interdisciplinary exchange.
A series of independent works have emerged from his fascination with systems of order, symbols, and signs: Large-format ink drawings of tabular structures. The larger the scale, the more striking their structure becomes. The table as a form stripped of its utilitarian purpose. Lists, tables, and classification systems predate poetry: The earliest writing systems were always intended for organizational purposes, aiming to record information in a permanent way so that it could still be understood years later.
Research, teaching, and artistic practice intertwine when we explore the relationship between form and content, our practices of making things comprehensible, the transmission of knowledge through symbols, and ultimately the question of how we tell our stories..