"The Return of the Giants" in Buenos Aires

The exhibition Return of the Giants / El Regreso de los Gigantes has previously been shown in the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo at Monterrey, the Museo de Arte Moderno at Mexico City and at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Sao Paulo. The show is now to been seen from November 5 2003 to January 15 2004 in the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo in Buenos Aires. As it did in the three previous locations Deutsche Bank Collection 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, Jiri 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.



Museo National de Arte Decorativo in Bueonos Aires

The exhibition Die Rückkehr der Giganten / El Regreso de los Gigantes has jointly been realised by Deutsche Bank employees on location and the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation. Over 100 clients and employees from both divisions have attended the grand opening at the magnificent mansion of the former ambassador to Chile in Buenos Aires.

The Return of the Giants proclaimed here is meant programmatically in a two-fold sense.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.


exhibition view

In this context, Jörg Immendorff’s series Cafe 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 Cafe 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.