Zeitgenössische Kunst – serie

"As a politically thinking person, I am not a morally thinking person.” While German painting of the postwar period essentially concerned itself with coming to terms with the past and presenting it in gestures ranging from the heroic to the ironic, Daniel Richter focuses on positioning himself in the present. Time and again he devises new ways of being “modern” in a medium that has long been labeled old-fashioned and anachronistic. His pictures constantly challenge the spectator by their painterly and contextually excessive demands, but they do not lecture on moral issues. In five chapters featuring more than 200 examples of his works, the author Eva Meyer-Hermann traces the chronological development of Richter’s artistic output for the first time. The turns from abstraction to figuration and back again that until now have been described as abrupt, prove on closer examination to be a logical consequence and a sign of conscious artistic action.

It’s All About Freedom presents a comprehensive cross-section through nine decades of Tomi Ungerer’s artistic work for the first time—from drawings from the nineteen-thirties to objects from the two thousand–tens. The exhibits selected shed new light on Ungerer’s oeuvre by making it possible to comprehend the artistic dimension of the political and stylistic lines and breaks in his oeuvre as a ‘freewheeling artist’. His passion for experimenting across genres and the interplay between drawing, collage, and assemblage through which he searched for identity and humanity is thus shown in his work again and again. Developed by the Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg in cooperation with the Tomi Ungerer Estate and the Musée Tomi Ungerer in Strasbourg, the volume brings together contributions on Tomi Ungerer’s life’s work by Thomas David, Belinda Grace Gardner, Aria Ungerer, and Thérèse Willer, with a foreword by Dirk Luckow and Harald Falckenberg.

Georg Baselitz enters a dialogue with the Old Masters - invited by Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, the acclaimed German painter and sculptor engages in a visual conversation. Baselitz himself curated this selection of works, focusing exclusively on nude painting. Both the exhibition and the catalogue revolve around this elemental human state, and its fundamental role in European art.From the beginning of his career, Baselitz’s work has been informed by a pronounced awareness of art history, above all he was inspired by Mannerism’s break with classical rules. Insights into the history of nude painting, as well into the topicality of painting itself, emerge from this encounter of Baselitz’s works with historical paintings of an idealized beauty from Kunsthistorisches Museum. The carefully chosen juxtapositions open up a space in which one can reflect and experience the essence of painting anew.

At the age of just 18, Zhao Gang, the son of Manchurian intellectuals, was the youngest member of the legendary Star Group, alongside Ai Weiwei as well as Huang Rui. In 1979, the way the up-and-coming avant-garde group in China protested against the party’s control of art was as influential as it was unsuccessful. Later, he studied in Europe and in the United States, acquired American citizenship, and is regarded as one of the outstanding “representatives of his generation, who truly understands East as well as West and speaks Chinese and English as a native language” (Phil Tinara) and who, as a passionate painter, consequently, also blends the visual language of East and West into a hybrid in a subtle, rebellious, sensitive, frenetic, mischievous, and absurd manner.In 2018 he took part in the survey exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” at the Guggenheim Museum, which showed the crème de la crème of contemporary art. The publication provides an overview of six central exhibitions from recent years, and takes a retrospective look at his work and life.