Il Ritorno dei Giganti
After closing at Milan’s Fondazione
Antonio Mazzotta, Il Ritorno dei Giganti/ The
Return of the Giants will resume its tour in Latin America on October
25, 2002 in Monterrey, Mexico; in this exhibition, the collection of the
Deutsche Bank will be showing a selection of works that enjoyed a spectacular
triumph on the international art scene at the beginning of the eighties,
coming to be known under the collective title Heftige Malerei, or fierce
painting (order catalogue
here). Around 150 paintings and works on paper by the artists Elvira
Bach, Georg Baselitz, Walter Dahn, Jirí Georg Dokoupil, Rainer Fetting,
Antonius
Höckelmann, Karl Horst Hödicke, Jörg Immendorff, Dieter
Krieg, Markus
Lüpertz, Helmut Middendorf, and A.R. Penck will be on show.
The
Return of the Giants proclaimed here is meant programmatically in a
two-fold sense.
Rainer Fetting: Van Gogh Gauguin - "Rückkehr der Giganten", 1980
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2002
Borrowed from a work of the same name by Rainer Fetting,
the title not only quotes the onetime hearkening back to pre-modernist
painting, but also refers to the heavily staged debut of a generation of
painters whose members themselves now count among the ”giants” of recent
German art history. As the proponents of a New
Figuration, the artists shown represent an artistic movement whose
first stirrings occurred at the same time the Deutsche Bank began systematically
amassing its collection. Twelve years after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
The Return of the Giants recalls a time during which German art
became intensively involved with its own history and cultural values.
Jörg Immendorff:
aus der Serie "Cafe Deutschland"
Cafe Deutschland, 1978
© Jörg Immendorff, Düsseldorf
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Jörg Immendorff:
aus der Serie "Cafe Deutschland"
Cafe Deutschland, 1978
© Jörg Immendorff, Düsseldorf
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In this context, Jörg Immendorff’s series Café Deutschland stands for
an individual German historical painting. What initially sparked the work
was Immendorff’s trip to East Berlin, where he met A.R. Penck, who was
living in Dresden at the time. The painting series that ensued became a
conscious counter-image to Renato
Guttoso’s famous Café
Greco, turning against its politicizing realism that had exerted
a strong influence on Socialist Realism in the German Democratic Republic
from the sixties onwards. The paper works shown in the exhibition served
Immendorff as studies for his large-format paintings that depicted the
private East/West conflict between the two artist friends in an exemplary
way. In his involvement with Penck, Immendorff questioned the ideologically
influenced confrontation between the two power blocs and the father figures
and symbols of the German nation, some of which were of dubious character.
And this is where he found the material for his unrealized dreams: the
Brandenburg Gate with its plummeting Quadriga, the German eagle as nightmare,
a Germany covered in ice and still riddled with war tanks. His gouache
and acrylic paintings conjugate an entire vocabulary in which private experience
and political content overlap. Immendorff’s expressive image puzzles resist
both an unequivocal statement and a political interpretation into friend/foe
categories.
With their ”subjective” mythologies, A.R.Penck
and Georg Baselitz, who had both received their art education in the GDR,
reacted to the smooth consumerist world of the economic wonderland West
Germany. Already in the early sixties, a manner of painting arose with
a pictorial language that played with signs, placing itself in opposition
to the hegemony of abstract art. A radical departure from Conceptual and
Minimal Art, however, which were seen as overly intellectualized, only
occurred later, with the emergence of the Junge
Wilde in the early eighties.
With their figuration grounded in subjectivity
and their fierce gestures, these artists opposed the habitual conventions
of the art establishment. Thus, the exhibitions of the Cologne artists’
group Mühlheimer Freiheit, to which Walter
Dahn, Peter Bömmels (interview in db-art.info 1 here),
and Jirí Georg Dokoupil belonged, undermined the public’s expectations:
their works were piled up to the ceiling, tacked directly to the wall,
or leaned up against it. The reassessment of values that Punk had long
since brought to the music scene had finally captured art, as well. |
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Jiri Georg Dokoupil: o.T., 1984
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2002
In Berlin, like-minded personages were easily found. In an exhibition shown
in 1980 in Berlin’s Haus am Waldsee, in which Rainer Fetting, Helmut
Middendorf, Salomé, and Bernd Zimmer took part, the term ”Heftige Malerei”
was coined for the first time. The artists’ cooperative gallery on Moritzplatz
in Kreuzberg as well as Salomé’s Punk band Geile
Tiere quickly achieved cult status and became fixed parts of the
Berlin scene.
Karl Host Hödicke: o.T., 1979
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2002
The proponents of Heftige Malerei referred back
to the classical Expressionism of Die Brücke and Oskar Kokoschka as well
as the figurative oeuvre of their ”teachers.” This break with conventions
would never have been conceivable without the influence of Baselitz, Höckelmann,
Hödicke, Krieg, or Lüpertz. Common projects developed out of a close contact
with the music scene. With its Punk and New Wave concerts, SO36, founded
in Berlin in 1978, became a meeting place for the young Berlin art scene.
In 1979, Martin Kippenberger took over the club’s management for one year.
Along with musical performances, exhibitions were now put on as well, in
which Elvira Bach, for instance, presented her Bathtub Paintings.
Transforming her immediate environment into sign-like ciphers, the bathroom
served Bach as an intimate point of departure for introspection. From these
self-portrayals, she later developed her dominant women figures, presented
in this exhibition.
Elvira Bach: Nacht unter Palmen,1983
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2002
As ironic and subversive as Heftige Malerei
was: twenty years later, Il Ritorno dei Giganti documents a condition
that makes us contemplative today. Along with Elvira Bach, Ina Barfuß counts
among the few women artists who were admitted into the painter’s inner
circle of ”giants.”
Maria Morais
Translation: Andrea Scrima
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