From 1960 to 1962 Wolfram Erber, a 21-year old self-taught artist, traveled to Italy, the South of France, and North Africa. On his way back, he stopped in Paris for around one year. Here he encountered the work of Fernand Léger, which had a lasting influence on the further development of his own work. But it was the poems and theoretical texts of Stéphane Mallarmé in particular that were lifelong sources of inspiration for Erber’s drawings. In 1965 he had his first exhibition at Friedrich and Dahlem. In the same year he self-published his poems with etchings, produced during his time in Paris. This was followed by an intense period focusing on the book I Ching and its system of signs, which served as a basis to develop a range of extremely complex artistic applications. In the mid-1970s he returned to Mallarmé with drawings and pastels for the great poem “Un coup de dès”. A series of 21 pastels and two drawings were published alongside a German translation of the poem in 1980 by Fred Jahn, Munich. This was accompanied by exhibitions at Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich, Folker Skulima, Berlin, in 1981, and Annemarie Verna, Zurich, in 1982. In 2015 the Mallarmé theme was featured again in the exhibition "39 Pastel Pictures 2012-2014" with a catalogue text by Siegfried Gohr.