The constructive-concrete artist Manfred Luther was, like Carlfriedrich Claus, A.R. Penck or Gerhard Altenbourg, an exceptional phenomenon of East German modernism. He is regarded as a philosopher among the Dresden abstract artists around Hermann Glöckner. At the beginning of his active artistic period in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he developed an artistic language that anticipated key phenomena of Western European and American art.