Self-taught German artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (1932-2024) was a key contributor to the international mail art network of the 1970s and 1980s. Trained as a typist, Wolf-Rehfeldt created ‘typewritings,’ a term she coined to describe her visual poetry written on a typewriter. Harkening to semiotics and concrete poetry, typewritings are combinations of letters, symbols and visual forms. From the original texts, Wolf-Rehfeldt would create (zinc lithograph) prints, which she would then send out as mail art. For Wolf-Rehfeldt, “Mail Art was a kind of safety valve, and, too, a certain satisfaction. I was never able to travel, but I was glad that I had contact throughout the world that all the others who were allowed to travel sometimes didn’t have."

Wolf-Rehfeldt had an ongoing correspondence with Paulo Bruscky, creating a connection between dictatorship-era Brazil and East Germany. Living in Berlin, she shared a studio with her husband, artist Robert Rehfeldt and it became a meeting place for the local and international art community. Their network of contacts included György Galántai and Endre Tót in Hungary; Milan Knižak and Jiří Valoch in Czechoslovakia; Pawel Petasz, Waclaw Ropiecki and Tomasz Schulz in Poland; Andrej Tišma, Dobrica Kamperelić and Nenad Bogdanović in Yugoslavia. Wolf-Rehfeldt was heavily impacted by the East and West divide, so much so that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 she felt there was no further need for her make mail art, saying “I didn’t feel it was relevant anymore, because suddenly we had all this freedom.”