MENSCHENBILDER

15. 11. 2012 — 6. 1. 2013

The exhibition at the Museum Frieder Burda offers a new, exciting look at the Frieder Burda Collection, in which the depiction of human beings is a frequently recurring motif. The selected works take up the theme of figuration in different ways and show how variedly the various artists deal with it in terms of content and style. The theme human being runs like a red thread through the exhibition. The combination and juxtaposition of the paintings leads to extraordinary dialogues and surprising points of contact. On display are well-known works by Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, but also less well-known works by artists of the younger generation such as Tim Eitel, Susanne Kühn or Simon Pasieka, some of which have not yet been shown.

From different perspectives, the museum’s various exhibition rooms tell about being human and illustrate how the theme is taken up by artists in the collection and finds its way into individual forms of expression. Thus the exhibition also documents an accentuated cross-section of the art movements of the past fifty years.

Human motifs as a means of sounding out representational possibilities can be found in the paintings of Georg Baselitz and Sigmar Polke. From the 1960s onwards, Baselitz’s art helped to revive representational painting in post-war Western Germany. With the reversal of the pictorial motif, the so-called Kopfbilder, in which he liberated the representation of content and meaning, Baselitz became internationally known. The exhibition presents a series of figurative head paintings and sculptures by the artist. In Sigmar Polke’s work, the subtle play with the materials and pictorial models used is the main focus, from the versatility of which he develops his personal, witty cosmos of figures. In his early paintings, Gerhard Richter took the path of figuration as the German version of Pop Art by transferring photographs from newspapers to canvas. His early work, however, also bears witness to a destructive or processual aspect, as Richter sometimes changes and reworks his paintings. Exemplary for this process is the famous work “Party in the Frieder Burda Collection. Dissatisfied with the completed painting, Richter slit open the canvas, sewed it with a coarse string and later maltreated it with nails in the style of his artist friend Günther Uecker. The concealment, dissolution or erasure of figurative elements is also found in the work of the Austrian Arnulf Rainer and the young Frenchman Marc Desgrandchamps, of whom exemplary works can be seen.

Figuration, which is primarily intended to convey a statement of content, is illustrated by the works of Eugen Schönebeck or Markus Lüpertz. Schönebeck’s two-dimensional, brightly colored portraits of communist personalities such as Mao Tse-Tung or Mayakovsky stand for the Pop Art movement, but their heroic nature is above all an expression of the artist’s political stance. In the triptych “Cyclops I, II, III – dithyrambic Markus Lüpertz unites different levels of meaning, such as through the repetition of motifs, the reference to Nietzsche’s hymns to the ancient god Dionysus, or through the military looking outfit of the “Cyclops to the difficult aspects of German history. At the same time, however, Lüpertz underscores with this strikingly pompous depiction that painting unfolds its true life on this side of the motifs.

The human image in art also raises social or emotional questions. Thus, the figurative, photorealistic positions of the younger generation of artists tend to focus on aspects of human existence. They are atmospherically charged mood images that capture situations of shared experience. They tell of friendship, freedom and the experience of nature, just as Tim Eitel in his romantic painting “Evening lets a young woman roam the landscape. This dream world left to the youth is juxtaposed with a group of works whose picture stories take place in the private, domestic sphere. These include Susanne Kühn’s rigid architectural backdrops, but also the pictures of Almut Heise, which evoke memories of the oppressively narrow world of the conservative bourgeoisie or freeze moments of loneliness. Eberhard Havekost and Heribert C. Ottersbach visualize people in their working environment, trapped or free, in their depictions of international stock exchange floors or Karin Kneffel’s fishing scenes.

The final group consists of photography and video art, featuring works by Gregory Crewdson and Bill Viola. In their staged works, both artists explore the dark, unsettling, and melancholic aspects of human life, using elaborate and highly sophisticated techniques to evoke feelings of loneliness and frustration in the viewer.

The works on display from the Frieder Burda Collection reflect, in their complexity, all facets of the human condition; above all, however, they also speak to Frieder Burda's passion for collecting, his fascination with color, and the emotional expressive qualities of painting.