Best of German & Pop Art Auction @ Ketterer Kunst, Munich - 70th Anniversary Auction

Best of German & Pop Art 

Ketterer Kunst, Munich 

Anniversary Auction June 7/8, 2024 

The seventieth anniversary of KETTERER KUNST is celebrated with a sensational array of works. The highest estimate price tag in the house’s history has been put on Alexej Jawlensky’s marvelously elegiac "Spanische Tänzerin" in a blazing red dress, called up in the Evening Sale on June 7. Made in 1909, the pivotal work from the formative years of German Expressionism, in private hands for over ninety years, had only been known from a black-and-white photograph. Estimated at 7 to 10 million euros, it is particularly convincing for the fact that it is new to the market, as well as for the highly stylized Murnau landscape study it boasts on its reverse. A second market sensation is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's "Tanz im Varieté" from 1911, a time when the artist group "Brücke" set out to revolutionize the art world from its new base in Berlin. With unknown whereabouts for a long time, its existence was only documented by a black-and-white photo. Family-owned for eighty years, it is now up for sale at an estimate of 2 to 3 million euros.

Traditionally, German Expressionism is among Ketterer Kunst's core fields of expertise. Accordingly, the strong range of works in both our Evening Sale and Day Sale (June 8) featuring key works of Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein, Heinrich Campendonk and Gabriele Münter, most of which are priced in five- to six-figure realms. In addition, the auction also includes works on paper from the legendary Hermann Gerlinger Collection, which Ketterer Kunst has sold over the past three years.

Savvy collectors and informed investors alike will find plenty of reasons to make a purchase in this anniversary auction, reflecting on the singularity of an artwork even in challenging times and duly assessing its quality, provenance and novelty on the market. And eventually seize the opportunity. Needless to say this is also true for works of post-war and contemporary art, works like those of Ernst Wilhelm Nay from the 1960s as well as Konrad Klapheck's machine paintings (an artist for whom Ketterer Kunst set a new price record in the last auction). There is still more, for example, a large-scale "Finger Painting" by Georg Baselitz from 1972 and a portrait that Gerhard Richter made of his artist friend Günter Uecker in a grayish sfumato in 1964.

In addition to a number of Kirchner objects, a remarkable private collection compiled with intellectual focus and curiosity, includes a series of Henry Moore sculptures. In the course of a lengthy relationship with the artist, Dr. Theo Maier-Mohr has acquired 'Sheep Pieces' that include maquettes and large outdoor sculptures, as well as prime pieces of Moore's 'Family Groups', hence covering and honoring the central themes that drove the great sculptor.

This time around, we also put a strong focus on American Pop Art, however, rather in terms of quality than quantity. The key piece in this array is a monumental, ironically provocative motif by James Rosenquist ("Playmate", 1966), while Andy Warhol's complete series of ten color silkscreens "Flowers" from 1970 and an impressive wall sculpture by the late Pop veteran Frank Stella follow suit. Robert Rauschenberg, a decidedly flexible maverick among the pop art rebels, quickly found his own path. The evidence we provide in our auction is the bicycle ("Bicycloid VII", 1992) with colored neon tubes, which is now doing its rounds in an auction for the very first time. 

Highlights Contemporary Art

James Rosenquist 

Playmate, 1966 

Oil on canvas in four parts, wood, metal wire 

Estimate price: € 1,000,000 - 1,500,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Rare on the auction market: Striking eroticism in an over-sized format from the heyday of American Pop Art. The work "Playmate" (1966) by James Rosenquist - the protagonist of American Pop Art with a great sense of humor – was part of the legendary "Playboy" magazine campaign "Playmate as Fine Art" in 1967. Other contributing artist were, among others, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and George Segal.

Andy Warhol 

Flowers (10 sheets), 1970 

10 color silkscreens 

Estimate price: € 800,000 - 1,200,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Andy Warhol's ten-part series "Flowers" is another icon of American Pop Art and rarely comes to the market as matching set. 

Georg Baselitz  

Finger Painting - Birch, 1972 

Oil on canvas.

Estimate price: € 800,000 - 1,200,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Georg Baselitz's "Finger Painting - Birch" from 1972 is one of his early works with the characteristic "upside down" motif. Works from this pioneering creative phase are extremely rare.

Henry Moore 

Working Model for Sheep Piece, 1971 

Bronze with green-brown patina.

Estimate price: € 600,000 – 800,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

One of Henry Moore's rare large-scale outdoor sculptures on the auction market. Further casts of our work can be found in museum collections in California, Michigan and Japan. Part of the same German private collection since its creation. Further works from the Dr. Maier-Mohr Collection are offered in the Evening Sale and the Contemporary Art Day Sale on Friday, June 7, 2024, as well as in our Modern Art Day Sale on Saturday, June 8, 2024 (see extra catalog "A Private Collection - Dr. Theo Maier-Mohr"). 

Gerhard Richter 

Herr Uecker, 1964 

Oil on canvas.

Estimate price: € 450,000 – 650,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Gerhard Richter's sought-after early black-and-white paintings from the 1960s are based on photographs. Richter subsequently "inpainted" his motifs in the moist paint enlarged to the dimensions of the canvas, dissolving the contours into soft blackand-white modulations. The famous painterly blur that would become his artistic trademark, first appeared in Richter's paintings of the early 1960s. Gerhard Richter's portrait of his fellow artist and friend Günther Uecker, the important "ZERO" protagonist, was created in the context of a small series of portraits that Richter created on the initiative of the legendary Düsseldorf gallery owner Alfred Schmela for his first solo exhibition in September 1964. "Herr Uecker" is one of the last early Richter portraits still in German private ownership.

Ernst Wilhelm Nay 

Ene mene ming mang. 1955 

Oil on canvas 

Estimate price: € 400,000 – 600,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Ernst Wilhelm Nay's painting "Ene mene ming mang" is of museum quality, showing a particularly harmonious color scheme in a large format from the group of the famous "Scheibenbilder" (Disk Paintings). As early as in 1957, Nay showed two works from this series in the exhibition "German Art of the Twentieth Century" at the Museum of Modern Art. Comparable works can be found in, among others, the Museum Folkwang, Essen, the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 

Frank Stella 

The Pequod Meets the Rosebud (D-19, 1X), 1991 

Mixed media on aluminum 

Estimate price: € 200,000 – 300,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

As an important representative of Minimal Art and Abstract Expressionism, Frank Stella's work "The Pequod Meets the Rosebud (D-19, 1X)" from the important Moby Dick series unfolds an overwhelming expansive monumentality with an explosion of form and color.

Robert Rauschenberg 

Posse Stir (Galvanic Suite), 1989 

Mixed media. Acrylic and lacquer on galvanized steel 

123,5 x 306 cm, incl. the original frame.

Estimate price: € 200,000 – 300,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Robert Rauschenberg 

Bicycloid VII, 1992 

Bicycle, with colored neon tubes on aluminum base. 151 x 190 x 56 cm.

Unique piece from a series of 7 bicycle sculptures.

Estimate price: € 100,000 – 200,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

Robert Rauschenberg's collaged compositions realized in silkscreen were groundbreaking for Pop Art. Our Evening Sale includes both a large-format radiant work from Rauschenberg's important "Galvanic Suite" (1988-1991) as well as the bicycle sculpture "Bicycloid VII", a futuristic hybrid between ready-made and neon sculpture. Both works were acquired directly from the artist through the Swiss gallery Jamileh Weber and have been part of an important southern German private collection since.

Konrad Klapheck 

Die Technik der Eroberung, 1965 

Oil on canvas 

Estimate price: € 180.000 – 240.000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

'Die Technik der Eroberung' is a masterful presentation of a surreal puzzlement as a symbol of a sensual-erotic quest. Konrad Klapheck tells a story of seduction in subtle colors with surprising accents in green and red. The work has featured in several important Klapheck exhibitions since 1966 

Highlights Modern Art

Alexej von Jawlensky 

Spanische Tänzerin, 1909 

Oil on cardboard

Estimate price: € 7,000,000 – 10,000,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

"Spanische Tänzerin” (Spanish Dancer) - An ecstatic and exuberant expressionist masterpiece by Alexej von Jawlensky. In 1909, he was at the absolute peak of his creativity. Paintings from this short and colorful creative phase are almost exclusively owned by international museums today. A powerful avant-garde double strike: the radiant, highly stylized oil study on the reverse is reminiscent of the painting "Murnauer Landschaft" from 1909, created in a smaller format the same year, it is part of the collection of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich today. Shortly after it was made, the painting found a home in the renowned modern art collection of Josef Gottschalk in Düsseldorf, and remained in the family for over nine decades. 

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 

Tanz im Varieté, 1911 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 2,000,000 – 3,000,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Spectacular rediscovery: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's "Tanz im Varieté" has been hidden in a German private collection for 80 years. Until now, the work was only known from a black-and-white photograph. The grand painting from the best "Brücke" period was part of the seminal "Brücke" exhibition at the Fritz Gurlitt Art Salon in Berlin (1912) shortly after it was created.

Heinrich Campendonk 

Landschaft mit Tieren, around 1913 

Oil on cardboard, laid on fiberboard and mounted on the stretcher

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

Heinrich Campendonk's "Landschaft mit Tieren" (Landscape with Animals), around 1913, dates from the artist's most innovative creative period: he showcased his talent in exhibitions of the "Blue Rider" and the Rhenish Expressionist in 1911 and 1913. In dialog with Franz Marc, he developed his distinctive pictorial language. This largeformat work was presented in major exhibitions at the leading galleries of the time (Walden and Flechtheim) and is now offered with an estimate price of € 600,000 - 800,000.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 

Im Wald, 1910 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 400,000 – 600,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

Erich Heckel 

Zwei Menschen im Freien, 1909/10 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 400,000 – 600,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

A rare opportunity! Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein spent the summer of 1910 at the Moritzburg Ponds with a number of friends and models, painting in the woods and by the ponds. In the forests and lakes around Moritzburg, the artists occasionally set up their easels in a row to capture one and the same scene, which explains why the naked couple in Kirchner's painting "Im Wald" is also depicted in Heckel's "Zwei Menschen im Freien".

Hermann Stenner 

Kaffeegarten am Ammersee, 1911 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 90,000 – 120,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

From the Hermann-Josef Bunte Collection: This auction puts Stenner in the foreground with 14 important works from a total of 27 lots from the Bunte Collection. In addition, works by other artists from the Hölzel circle are also on offer. Ackermann, Kinzinger, Graf, Eberhard, as well as works by Sagewka and Böckstiegel again.

In "Kaffeegarten am Ammersee", Stenner boldly combined impressionist lightness and bright colors with highly concentrated surfaces. This works should become one of his most accomplished paintings from the summer sojourn in Dießen on Lake Ammer.

Highlights 19th Century Art

Max Liebermann 

Die Colomierstraße in Wannsee, 1917 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 200.000 - 300.000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the house on Wannsee, hidden in the picture on the right, became Max Liebermann's artistic retreat. This was where he created his most sought-after works. Our painting also boasts an important provenance: it was part of the estate of Albert Janus, important collector and patron of the Folkwang Museum. In 2010, it was exhibited on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Liebermann Villa on Wannsee.

Max Liebermann 

Wannseegarten - Haus mit roten Stauden, 1926 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 400,000 – 600,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

In his celebrated paintings of the garden at his Wannsee villa, Max Liebermann liberated form and color in an unprecedented way. Wannsee paintings of this luminosity are extremely rare on the auction market.

Franz von Stuck 

Der Engel des Gerichts, around 1922 

Oil on panel

Estimate price: € 100,000 – 150,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

For over 20 years, Franz von Stuck's " Der Engel des Gerichts" (The Angel of Judgement) was on permanent loan at the Künstlerhaus am Lenbachplatz in Munich. A fascinating interpretation and daring modernization of the age-old motif in the rebellious zeitgeist prevailing at the turn of the century. The work has been privately owned since its creation and is now available on the auction market for the first time.

DATES

June 7, 2024 Contemporary Art Day Sale, Evening Sale in Munich

June 8, 2024 19th Century, Modern Art Day Sale in Munich

Until June 15, 2024 Online Sale - parallel to the saleroom auction

Preview Shows of the Top Lots in Munich

Ketterer Kunst, Joseph-Wild-Str. 18, 81829 Munich

June 1, 2024 12 - 6 p.m.

June 2, 2024 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.

June 3 - 4, 2024 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.

June 5, 2024 10 a.m. - 8 p.m.

June 6, 2024 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

KETTERER KUNST

www.kettererkunst.com

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Rediscovery of a painting @ Ketterer Kunst: Evening Sale in Munich, 7 June 2024

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 

Rediscovery of a painting

Ketterer Kunst: Evening Sale in Munich

7 June 2024

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “Tanz im Varieté (Steptanz)“

Oil on canvas, 120 x 145 cm, Evening Sale June 7, 2024

Photo Courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

 For the first time published in color: to date only known from black-and-white photographs.

 Grand-sized painting from the best "Brücke" era.

 Part of the seminal "Brücke" exhibition at the Berlin art salon of Fritz Gurlitt (1912) shortly after it was made.

 Estimate price: € 2 - 3 million. 

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's life and work have been subject to extensive research. And now this sensation: Ketterer Kunst’s Evening Sale on the occasion of the company’s 70th anniversary on June 7 features a painting that could not be located for decades. Its outstanding significance in the oeuvre of the co-founder of the "Brücke" group had been forgotten. There were some publications, and there was evidence of the work in the sensational Brücke exhibition at Galerie Fritz Gurlitt in Berlin in 1912, as well as of a later exhibition at Paul Cassirer in Berlin in 1923. Now the collectors from Baden-Württemberg, who have enjoyed the painting for generations - eighty years to be precise - in private and without any public attention, have decided to sell it.

Measuring 120 by 145 centimeters, “Tanz im Varieté (Steptanz)“ is an extraordinarily large picture in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s oeuvre, it was made in 1911, the year the artist relocated from Dresden to the metropolis Berlin, a cosmopolitan city of two million even back then, a vibrant melting pot that promised inspiration and, of course, more market presence. The beginning of an extremely prolific creative phase; his works from that period up until the First World War are among his most outstanding accomplishments. Today they are almost exclusively museum-owned, while just a few are in private hands. Their market presence has been extremely low in the last couple of years.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s famous street scenes come from that era; all of his cabaret and circus pictures are expressions of an urban liveliness, a revealing joie de vivre and eroticism. The social and cultural changes are tangible in his motifs and compositions. Emotion and harshness are combined in an equally provocative and convincing way. At the same time, our work is a very characteristic, extraordinarily successful and decisive example of Kirchner's endeavor to render the moment of a powerful and energetic motion ("My painting is a painting of motion").

Estimated at 2 to 3 million euros, the painting is mentioned in Donald E. Gordon's authoritative catalogue raisonné (1968) accompanied by an old black-and-white photograph, however, it is marked as "whereabouts unknown". Neither the estate and leading experts nor the archive had ever seen it in color.

KETTERER KUNST

Ketterer Kunst with its headquarters in Munich and branches in Hamburg, Cologne and Berlin, as well as with a global network of experts, was founded in 1954. Robert Ketterer is the second generation to run the family business. The auction house has a focus on Contemporary, Modern and 19th Century Art and on Rare Books from five centuries. In its market segment, Ketterer Kunst is the number 1 in the German language region and is in the global top ten of the strongest-selling art auction houses (artprice.com).

UPCOMING DATES:

Anniversary Auction – 70 Years of Ketterer Kunst

May 27, 2024 Rare Books Auction in Hamburg

June 7, 2024 Contemporary Art Day Sale, Evening Sale in Munich

June 8, 2024 19th Century, Modern Art Day Sale in Munich

KETTERER KUNST

www.kettererkunst.com

Alex Katz: Portraits and Landscapes @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich - Exhibition curated by Achim Hochdörfer with Lena Tilk

Alex Katz: Portraits and Landscapes  

Museum Brandhorst, Munich  

Through 16 February 2025 

ALEX KATZ, who celebrates his 97th birthday this year, is one of the most important representatives of contemporary painting. During his long career, which has now spanned more than 70 years, he has dedicated himself to depicting the here and now, which is why he has described his art as “painting in the present tense.”

Alex Katz has donated two paintings to Museum Brandhorst. An early work from 1958, showing the painter and sculptor George Ortman, and a recent, very personal double portrait of his wife Ada and his son Vincent. To mark this generous donation, Museum Brandhorst is presenting the exhibition “Alex Katz: Portraits and Landscapes,” which, in addition to the two new acquisitions, also presents the rich inventory of work by the artist held by the Brandhorst Collection. Following the major monographic exhibition Alex Katz in 2018-2019, the current show once again brings together major works from all his creative phases.

ALEX KATZ: PORTRAITS

In his portraits, Alex Katz depicts family members, acquaintances and artist friends – whether individually or in groups – with an almost simple monumentality. His flair for painterly surfaces stands in an exciting relationship to the formal language of film, fashion and advertising. This is one of the reasons why Alex Katz is also celebrated as a forerunner of Pop Art.

One of Alex Katz’s major works is “The Black Dress” (1960), in which he depicts his wife Ada six times, each time in an elegant black cocktail dress. The repetition of one and the same figure is reminiscent of a film strip, comparable to the serial character of Andy Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor and Jackie Kennedy, created a few years later.From an early stage, Katz found important allies and aesthetic inspiration among contemporary poets, musicians and dancers. Museum Brandhorst owns two iconic pictures of the choreographer Paul Taylor (1930–2018) and his Dance Company. Taylor stands before us in this 1959 portrait with a sense of challenging calm. His tense strength suggests that he could jump out of the picture at any moment and start dancing. As Alex Katz later recalled, “I had seen Paul dance for the first time shortly before we met... and thought his choreography was one of the most surprising things I had seen as an artist. Paul’s dancing seemed to be a real break with that of the previous generation: no expression, no content, no form, as he said, and with great technique and intelligence.”

ALEX KATZ: LANDSCAPES

Alex Katz celebrated his first successes in the New York art scene at the height of Abstract Expressionism. Yet he always remained committed to figurative painting. It was only late, in the mid-1980s, that he approached gestural abstraction in his landscapes and cityscapes. The branches, twigs and leaves in his paintings are reminiscent of the spontaneous gestures and ‘drip paintings’ of Jackson Pollock. Each individual brushstroke can be read figuratively and at the same time appears as an autonomous visual sign.

In some of these paintings, the light itself – whether direct, reflected, or diffuse – becomes the defining theme. Reflections in water and depictions in fog or at dusk often serve as a means of capturing the moods of different times of day.  “These are all very fleeting things, quickly over,” says Alex Katz. “I have captured twilight in landscapes that can only be seen for a quarter of an hour. That fascinates me because it’s real high-speed perception.”

ALEX KATZ: STUDIES

With their clear design and masterful technique, Alex Katz’s paintings convey the impression of great ease, as if they had come naturally into the world. However, their creation process is much more complex. Alex Katz’s large-format paintings on canvas usually develop from smaller oil studies that are created on prepared hardboard. For his landscapes, he usually sketches the same scenery at the same time in the same place on successive days and finally selects the one that seems most interesting to him in order to enlarge it to scale. Due to their sketch-like spontaneity, these studies have a special aesthetic appeal.

THE DONATIONS OF ALEX KATZ: “George Ortman” and “Ada and Vincent”

Even at the age of 96, Alex Katz is still an enormously productive artist, as the more recent of his two donations, “Ada and Vincent,” proves. There are 65 years between "Ada and Vincent" from 2023 and "George Ortman" from 1958. The donations bridge the gap between his early and late work and enable an examination of aesthetic and thematic leitmotifs over the course of his 70-year career. Both works provide insights into Alex Katz’s very personal family environment and are also contemporary documents of the social and artistic milieu in downtown New York in the 1950s. A juxtaposition of landscapes and portraits shows how virtuously and playfully Alex Katz navigates between improvised gestures and cool realism, traditional painting and the exploration of photography and film.

Alex Katz, who was born in 1927 and has since inspired generations of painters, is one of the most important artists in the Brandhorst Collection alongside Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly – both of whom were born in 1928. Anette and Udo Brandhorst were passionate admirers and supporters of Alex Katz from an early age. The artist’s generous donation is due not least to this close relationship.

Curated by Achim Hochdörfer with Lena Tilk.

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Theresienstrasse 35A, 80333 München

www.museum-brandhorst.de

ALEX KATZ: PORTRAITS AND LANDSCAPES 

MUSEUM BRANDHORST, MUNICH - 22 MARCH 2024 - 16 FEBRUARY 2025

Andy Warhol & Keith Haring Exhibition @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich - "Andy Warhol & Keith Haring. Party of Life"

Andy Warhol & Keith Haring 

Party of Life

Museum Brandhorst, Munich

28 June 2024 - 26 January 2025

Andy Warhol & Keith Haring. Party of Life

Museum Brandhorst

28 June 2024 - 26 January 2025

Design: Parat.cc

Nan Goldin 

Keith Haring & Andy Warhol at Palladium, 1985

© Nan Goldin, Courtesy Nan Goldin, New York

Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Undated

Polaroid, 10.8 x 8.35 cm

© Collection: Keith Haring Foundation, New York, NY

They were pop stars, social butterflies and (self-)marketing geniuses: Andy Warhol and Keith Haring were not only two of the most famous artists of the second half of the 20th century. They also revolutionized established ideas about art and its distribution. Andy Warhol’s pop paintings and Keith Haring’s dancing figures are part of our collective visual memory and are still omnipresent to this day in the areas of advertising, fashion, music and film. Despite the large age gap and their different styles, the two artists were friends and companions. In New York's art and clubbing scene, they met and influenced each other—and many others besides.

With “Andy Warhol & Keith Haring. Party of Life,” Museum Brandhorst presents the world’s first comprehensive institutional exhibition dedicated to the two artists. The title of the show is borrowed from the motto of Keith Haring’s birthday celebrations: “Party of Life” tells of the cosmos of the 1980s, of MTV, discos, voguing, hip-hop, New Wave and graffiti. Within this context, the exhibition traces the two artists’ friendship. It reveals parallels in their artistic identity, their openness to cooperations and community projects, and their inclusive attitude: Art and its messages should reach as many people as possible.

Keith Haring

Andy Mouse, 1985

Acrylic and oil on canvas, 122,4 x 122,4 cm

Rogath Family Collection, courtesy of Prince & Wooster

© The Keith Haring Foundation

The exhibition shows over 120 works by Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, collaborations between the two as well as works realized together with artists, performers, authors or music and fashion icons of the time. Alongside key works, it focuses on film and photography, archival material as well as posters, records and everyday objects designed by the artists. “Party of Life” will open up new perspectives on both artists at Museum Brandhorst, which houses the largest Andy Warhol collection outside the United States with more than 120 works, as well as a growing body of Keith Haring works.

Curated by Franziska Linhardt in collaboration with Arthur Fink

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Theresienstrasse 35A, 80333 München

www.museum-brandhorst.de

Nicole Eisenman Exhibition @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich - What Happened

Nicole Eisenman. What Happened

Museum Brandhorst, Munich

24 March - 10 September 2023

“Nicole Eisenman. What Happened” at Museum Brandhorst surveys for the first time the entire spectrum of the artist’s three decades of work in painting and sculpture, bringing together approximately 100 works dating from 1992 to the present. Relevant from an art historical and social, political and deeply human perspective, it is an oeuvre that manages in an anarchic way to be both an homage to and a critique of its own subject.

Nicole Eisenman (*1965) has been one of the protagonists of the New York art scene since the 1990s and is today one of the most influential contemporary artists. From the beginning, her work has been characterized by a juxtaposition of different materials, formats and techniques, from paintings and works on paper to large-scale murals and installations. Characteristically, Eisenman draws from a variety of sources, including works from the Renaissance, underground comics, and socialist murals of the 1930s to name but a few. Many of her works invoke the experiences of lesbian communities in New York. However, rather than being documentary, they are highly imaginative and comical.

In her large-scale figurative paintings since the 2000s, Nicole Eisenman references her living environment, depicting the everyday in ways that are both humorous and compassionate. They are often group portraits, yet they tell not only of unity and connectedness, but also of loneliness and alienation within society. Since the mid-2010s, the artist has produced a series of monumental paintings in which she references the tense political atmosphere in the United States following the 2016 presidential election. Some works criticize those voters who fell for Donald Trump’s populist promises. Others feature politically engaged communities working together to confront a social culture that is on a dark path (“The Darkward Trail,” 2018). In recent years, sculptural works have also become more prominent in Nicole Eisenman’s practice. After initially working with plaster at the beginning of the 2010s, these days there is no material that the artist does not use in her sculptures. Their materiality references queer themes that continually preoccupy Eisenman, along with her unwavering humanist and universalist stance.

Visitors to the exhibition “Nicole Eisenman. What Happened” are immersed in three interwoven narrative threads as they explore the show. The first is about a lesbian artist with feminist convictions who begins painting for a small alternative community in New York’s downtown scene of the 1990s and whose works are now celebrated internationally. Another narrative is devoted to Eisenman’s view of and commentary on U.S. society and the cracks that run through it: the impact of George W. Bush’s presidency, the 2008 economic crisis, or the shift to the right in politics following Trump’s election. Likewise, Eisenman negotiates the omnipresence of screens in our everyday lives, imagines the U.S. landscape at the onset of climate catastrophe, and infuses the genre of history painting with new life by capturing recent protest movements such as Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police in her images. Finally, in a third narrative strand, the exhibition displays the impressive formal aesthetic experiments, ambition, and ingenuity in the selection of material that distinguish the artist’s oeuvre.

Accompanying the exhibition is a comprehensive catalog documenting the full range of Eisenman’s work. In his essay entitled “What Happened,” Mark Godfrey provides a comprehensive genesis of the work. In her text, Monika Bayer-Wermuth explores the question of fluidity of material and bodies alike. In addition to the essays by the two curators, Chloe Wyma devotes herself to Eisenman’s most recent works and her role within political discourses in the art world in recent years. Reminiscences and short contributions by numerous contemporaries complete the book, which provides an insight into the artist’s work that is as profound as it is personal.

German edition: ISBN 978-0-85488-318-9

English edition: ISBN 978-0-85488-312-7

An exhibition by Museum Brandhorst in cooperation with the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Mark Godfrey

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen

Theresienstrasse 35 a, 80333 Munich

www.museum-brandhorst.de

______________

Lucy McKenzie @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich - Prime Suspect

Lucy McKenzie – Prime Suspect

Museum Brandhorst, Munich

Through 21 February 2021

LUCY McKENZIE 

in front of the work "Mooncup" (2012) 

in the exhibition "Lucy McKenzie -Prime Suspect"

© Lucy McKenzie. Photo:Robert Haas

“Lucy McKenzie – Prime Suspect” is the first international survey exhibition of the Brussels-based Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie (b. 1977). Bringing together approximately 80 works dating from 1997 to the present, the exhibition brings together examples from all of the artist’s significant bodies of work. From her early works exploring the pageantry and iconography of international sport and the politics of postwar muralism, through her engagement with fin-de-siècle architecture and interior design and mid-century Belgian illustration, to her ongoing research into the intertwined histories of fashion and retail display, Lucy McKenzie has established herself among the most singular artistic voices of her generation.

In “Top of the Will” (1998-99), one of the earliest works in the exhibition, Lucy McKenzie combined staged photos of herself and her friends, dressed in gymnastics uniforms based on those worn by the Soviet teams of the 1970s, taped directly to the wall and interspersed with pages torn from vintage books and magazines. In its combination of fact and fiction, documentation and imitation – and a mode of presentation that simultaneously evokes a teenager’s bedroom décor and the “evidence wall” familiar to viewers of countless police procedurals – “Top of the Will” already introduces a combination of fanlike enthusiasm and forensic analysis that is among the most enduring features of Lucy McKenzie’s oeuvre.

Over the past two decades, Lucy McKenzie has excavated and transformed images, objects, and motifs from a wide range of historical moments and contexts, producing a body of work that defies easy categorization but that is, for that very reason, all the more compelling. She has revived the old tradition of trompe l’oeil painting—whose images are so convincingly real that they literally “deceive the eye”—using it as a means to inhabit, critique, and reimagine earlier styles and periods of art and design, illuminating an alternative history of modern art in which the so-called “applied arts” emerge as key players in a narrative that diverges from the established chronologies of modernism and the avant-garde.

Despite her own formidable skills as a painter, Lucy McKenzie has consistently refused to privilege one form of visual or material production over another, often highlighting vernacular and collaborative practices that have historically been marginalized or denigrated in the context of the fine arts. The large-scale installation “Interior” (2007) and the monumental painting “Ludwig Haus” (2009) each synthesize a variety of fin-de-siècle interior designs by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Victor Horta, and others, enlarging small watercolor sketches and presentation drawings to one-to-one architectural scale. Despite this massive shift, through which they become both paintings and environments, each work nevertheless retains the provisional qualities of its sources. More recently, Lucy McKenzie has mined such seemingly disparate veins as the visual rhetoric of cartography and advertising, while expanding her ongoing series of trompe l’oeil “quodlibet” paintings from pinboards and tabletop arrangements into three dimensions, further destabilizing the relationship between the thing depicted and the thing itself.

The politics of gender and the place of women and the representation of the female body in twentieth century art, architecture, and fashion is also a major theme that runs throughout the exhibition. Where the early painting “Curious” (1998) highlights the eroticization of female athletes in popular media, “Copy of Untitled, 2005” (2014) speaks to the banality of sexual and pornographic content in contemporary culture. “Co? Në!” (2004) imagines a 1960s-era mural advertising a fictional ladies’ deodorant, while “Mooncup” (2012) presents an enormous (unauthorized) advertisement for a real British maker of silicone menstrual cups. Such recent works as “Vionnet Salon Murals after Georges de Feure” (2016) and “Rebecca” (2019) take up the legacy of the early French designer Madeleine Vionnet, known for the mathematical precision of her garments, with construction details often executed to create decorative effects, thereby obviating the need for additional ornament.

Fashion and its dissemination and display are the central concerns of Atelier E.B, Lucy McKenzie’s ongoing collaboration with the Scottish designer Beca Lipscombe. Originally founded in 2007 as an interior design firm, by 2011 Atelier E.B had morphed into a successful line of ready-to-wear fashion employing the highest quality Scottish materials and artisanship. It has also come to function as a kind of artistic research bureau investigating the history of fashion as well as the history of display, from Worlds’ Fairs and heritage exhibitions to department stores and retail showrooms, presenting their findings in the form of exhibitions and publications. Atelier E.B’s fundamentally hybrid nature is exemplified by the architectural work “Faux Shop” (2018), acquired by the Museum Brandhorst in 2019, which functions simultaneously as a showcase for their Jasperwear collection and as an enormous trompe l’oeil sculptural installation in its own right.

The title of the exhibition, “Prime Suspect”, alludes to the way that Lucy McKenzie’s exhibitions often function like detective stories, in which a fictional premise provides the structure for her own investigations, using historical material to ask important and resonant questions about contemporary society. It also points to her own elusiveness in the process – in which the artist herself has a way of disappearing into the dense web of references she weaves in her work – and the challenges this poses to the traditional model of the solo exhibition. Beyond the sheer variety of her output, the formal variation from one body of work to the next can be disconcerting. Her technical dexterity has allowed Lucy McKenzie to develop a methodology that involves taking up and temporarily inhabiting the styles of other artists and periods. In so doing, however, she operates more like a pathologist or method actor than a counterfeiter or forger: for McKenzie, imitation operates not as a form of deception but as a means of understanding her subjects (whether individuals, movements, ideologies, or some combination thereof): of getting inside their heads and figuring out what makes them tick. Similarly, her frequent use of existing historical material differs importantly from the model of appropriation familiar from the art of the 1980s, where artists often sought to undermine the authority of their sources and their claims to authenticity. Rather, Lucy McKenzie herself performs the role of the detective, uncovering and rearticulating overlooked details from the past in order to reveal something of the social relations involved in their production, as well as what made them compelling in the first place, and thereby to better understand those relations in the present.

LUCY McKENZIE - PRIME SUSPECT

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive and profusely illustrated catalogue, documenting the full range of McKenzie’s oeuvre. It includes new essays by Mason Leaver-Yap, Leah Pires, Anne Pontégnie, and Jacob Proctor, as well as a short story by Lucy McKenzie. 350 pages, 282 color illustrations. Published by Museum Brandhorst in collaboration with Walther König. Language: German & English. ISBN 978-3-96098-852-6

Curator: Jacob Proctor

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Theresienstraße 35a, 80333 München

www.museum-brandhorst.de

New Acquisitions to the Blue Rider Collection @ Lenbachhaus, Munich - More Modern Art for the Lenbachhaus

More Modern Art for the Lenbachhaus

New Acquisitions to the Blue Rider Collection

Lenbachhaus, Munich

Through February 7, 2021

August Macke

Kinder am Brunnen II, 1910

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München

Ankauf des Förderverein Lenbachhaus e.V. 2019

Marianne von Werefkin

In die Nacht hinein, 1910

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München

Ankauf des Förderverein Lenbachhaus e.V. 2018

The Lenbachhaus in Munich preserves the world’s largest collection of works by the Blue Rider artists. It owes this treasure first and foremost to the extraordinary munificence of Gabriele Münter, who, on occasion of her eightieth birthday in 1957, made a singular gift to the municipal gallery that transformed it into a museum of international renown. The donation encompassed numerous works by Wassily Kandinsky from the years until 1914, by Münter herself, and by their colleagues from the Blue Rider and its orbit. Several considerable gifts followed, including, in 1965, the exceptionally generous bequest of Elly and Bernhard Koehler jun., the son of the prominent patron and collector of works by Franz Marc and August Macke. They made the Lenbachhaus the single most important place for scholarship on and the public presentation of the art of the Blue Rider, which has been central especially to its exhibition programming for more than six decades. The spiritus rector behind this development was Hans Konrad Roethel, the Lenbachhaus’s director between 1956 and 1971. His successors Armin Zweite and Helmut Friedel likewise launched successful endeavors to enlarge the collection. Still, major desiderata remain: important works by artists associated with the Blue Rider that would be most welcome additions to the collection.

Wilhelm Morgner

Die Holzarbeiter, 1911

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München

Helmuth Macke

Infanterie, um 1914/1915

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München

These art-historical "blanks" concern both certain periods and themes and some members and affiliates of the artists’ group. Most saliently, with the exception of Gabriele Münter, the collection until recently had no works by the women artists in the Blue Rider’s inner circle, such as Elisabeth Epstein or Maria Franck-Marc. Epstein was among the select few to  participate in the legendary First Blue Rider Exhibition at Galerie Thannhauser in 1911. She was also Kandinsky’s sparring partner in important theoretical debates and served as the group’s correspondent and liaison in the Paris art scene. Maria Marc-Franck sent two works to the Second Blue Rider Exhibition in 1912 and brought vital impulses to the Blue Rider’s engagement with the theme of "the worlds of children." The Lenbachhaus mounted a first retrospective of the artist’s oeuvre in 1995, but the collection did not have a single specimen of her art, a lacuna we were now able to close with four acquisitions. Wilhelm Morgner, whose stylistically unique drawing of a brickmaker stands out amid the wide range of contemporary positions in the almanac The Blue Rider, is another artist who was hitherto missing from the Lenbachhaus’s collection. In the tempera painting "The Woodworkers" (1911), the Lenbachhaus was able to purchase a work that impressively exemplifies the artist’s fascinating and distinctive style.

The work of collecting and studying the art of the Blue Rider is by no means done. On the contrary, the fewer lacunae remain, the more difficult closing them with targeted purchases becomes. In recent years, the Lenbachhaus has made a dedicated effort to enhance its collection by trying to acquire these special and difficult-to-find positions. Extensive research and the assistance of individuals and institutions have paved the way for a series of spectacular accessions to the collection. The acquisition of two self-portraits by Elisabeth Epstein—presumably the only extant works by the artist from the Blue Rider period known today—was arguably a small sensation.

LENBACHHAUS

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München

Luisenstrasse 33, 80333 Munich

www.lenbachhaus.de

Tutto. Perspectives on Italian Art @ Sammlung Goetz, Munich

Tutto. Perspectives on Italian art
Sammlung Goetz, Munich
September 19, 2019 – February 29, 2020

The cooperation exhibition between the Museion in Bolzano and the Sammlung Goetz presents more than 120 works in a dialogue. Starting from the artistic upheaval in the post- war period, the works convey insight into most noteworthy trends in Italian art. This international cooperation project marks the first time another collection with a wide selection of works is being presented in the exhibition spaces of the Sammlung Goetz.

“Tutto,” the title of the exhibition, was taken from the eponymous work by Alighiero Boetti from 1986. It is an iconic work from the last series of his embroidery work, in which he unites the principles of his artistic practice. The central concern of many of these artists was overcoming the two- dimensional canvas, as exemplified by Lucio Fontana in his “Concetto spaziale” in 1954. Through works of painting and photography, the show provides insights into various artistic approaches that combine the concepts of opening, expanding and overcoming traditional panel painting. The artistic positions range from experimentations with the canvas, as displayed by Carla Accardis, Enrico Castellanis and Agostino Bonalumis, to material explorations, as in the work of Piero Manzoni. Further emphasis is placed on the relationship between image and text and visual poetry in experimental works on paper, as well as conceptual photography from the 1960s and 1970s.

The exhibition is supplemented by an extensive selection of documentary material from the archives of the participating artists. The multitude of different art forms, such as photographs, posters, invitations, work notes and objects – unite to create a multifaceted overall picture.

A modified version of the exhibition was on view between October 2018 and March 2019 at the Museion in Bolzano. At the presentation in Munich, a third partner, the Neue Sammlung, was gained for the international cooperation project. The transgressing of boundaries in Italian art of the post- war period manifests itself not only in artistic concepts, but also in design. The exhibition in the Sammlung Goetz is complemented by objects of Murano glass and loans of new Italian design, while works of painting in the rooms of the Pinakothek der Moderne enter into a dialogue with other design objects.

An extensive and richly illustrated catalogue published by Hatje Cantz Verlag accompanied the cooperation exhibition between the Museion in Bolzano and the Sammlung Goetz and is available for EUR 29.90 at the museum and in bookstores.

Tutto

Perspektiven italienischer Kunst 

Prospettive sull’arte italiana 

Perspectives on Italian Art

HATJE CANTZ

Ed. Ingvild Goetz, Leo Lencsés für die Sammlung Goetz, 

Karsten Löckemann für die Sammlung Goetz, Letizia Ragaglia, 

text(s) by Leo Lencsés, Ingvild Goetz, Andreas Hapkemeyer, 

Karsten Löckemann, Letizia Ragaglia, Marion Piffer Damiani

German, Italian, English

2019. 128 pp., 180 ills.

softcover

24.00 x 32.00 cm

ISBN 978-3-7757-4522-2

With works by Carla Accardi, Vincenzo Agnetti, Giovanni Anselmo, Nanni Balestrini, Gianfranco Baruchello, Alighiero Boetti, Agostino Bonalumi, Luciano Caruso, Enrico Castellani, Giuseppe Chiari, Giorgio Ciam, Dadamaino, Giuseppe Desiato, Luciano Fabro, Lucio Fontana, Luigi Ghirri, Emilio Isgrò, Marcello Jori, Ketty La Rocca, Arrigo Lora- Totino, Piero Manzoni, Elio Mariani, Plinio Martelli, Stelio Maria Martini, Fabio Mauri, Maurizio Nannucci, Ugo Nespolo, Germano Olivotto, Giulio Paolini, Claudio Parmiggiani, Giuseppe Penone, Achille Perilli, Gianni Pettena, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mimmo Rotella, Salvatore Scarpitta, Paolo Scheggi, Mario Schifano, Franco Vaccari, Emilio Villa, Michele Zaza

Curated by: Ingvild Goetz, Leo Lencsés, Karsten Löckemann, Letizia Ragaglia, Elena Re

A cooperation with the Museion in Bolzano and Neue Sammlung, München

SAMMLUNG GOETZ, MUNICH
Oberföhringer Strasse 103, 81925 Munich
www.sammlung-goetz.de

Alex Katz Retrospective Exhibition @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich

Alex Katz

Museum Brandhorst, Munich

6 December 2018 – 22 April 2019

The Museum Brandhorst presents a major exhibition of works by celebrated American painter Alex Katz. A towering figure in contemporary painting best known for his iconic portraits of beautiful, stylish women, masterfully rendered in bold, vibrant colors, Alex Katz has influenced and inspired generations of artists around the world. Featuring about ninety works—including some of the artist’s most important paintings—the exhibition offers visitors a retrospective overview of this seminal artist’s oeuvre from the 1950s to today.

ALEX KATZ (born 1927, New York) emerged on the New York scene during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and just prior to the explosion of Pop Art. Although he is often hailed as one of the precursors to Pop, his aesthetic is perhaps more closely aligned with such poets as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery than with other painters of his generation. His unique oeuvre, which now spans some 70 years, is utterly devoted to the representation of the here and now and the immediacy of human perception—a commitment to what the artist has often described as “painting in the present tense.” Working variously en plein air, from photographic sources, and from his own sketches and preparatory drawings, he has focused his attention on subject matter from his immediate milieu: portraits of family (in particular his wife Ada) and friends, artistic collaborators and scenes of social interaction, landscapes and architectural scenes, and flowers. Throughout, Alex Katz’s sensitivity for painterly surfaces unfolds in productive tension with the formal languages of film, fashion, and advertising.

The exhibition begins with works from the late 1950s and early 1960s, including portraits of the renowned choreographer and dancer Paul Taylor and his company, for which Alex Katz designed many sets. A series of seminal single and group portraits from the 1960s establish Alex Katz’s signature style as well as the social and artistic milieu of Downtown New York, both of which remain leitmotifs throughout his work and the exhibition. Two large galleries of landscapes show Alex Katz playing at the edge of abstraction while at the same time recommitting himself to a decidedly modern form of realism.

The quality of light itself, whether direct, reflected, or diffused, becomes a central concern in these paintings. So, too, does the ability of an individual brushstroke to delimit multiple different types of form while also retaining its status as an autonomous mark.

Also on display is a sizable collection of small oil paintings, sketches, and preparatory drawings. Often directly related to the large-scale paintings on view, these works will provide visitors with an expanded understanding of the artist’s multi-layered working process.

The exhibition draws on the Museum Brandhorst’s own extensive collection of works by the artist—including masterpieces from across his long career—supplemented by key works from other public and private collections, and provides an extended glimpse into the prolific production of this 91-year-old painter.

 An abundantly illustrated catalogue was published by Hirmer Verlag, featuring newly commissioned texts on the artist by critic Kirsty Bell and art historian Prudence Peiffer, as well as reflections by contemporary artists Arturo Herrera, Jordan Kantor, and Matt Saunders (ISBN 978-3-7774-3237-3).

On the occasion of the exhibition, the museum premieres a new documentary film on Alex Katz, directed by Kristina Kilian of the University of Television and Film (HFF) Munich. This project is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Museum Brandhorst and the HFF.

Curator: Jacob Proctor

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Theresienstrasse 35A, 80333 München

www.museum-brandhorst.de