Magical Mystery Tour
Young Painting and the
Re-Invention of the Past
In search of things past:
whether it's Peter Doig's mysteriously melancholic landscape images, Karen
Kilimnik's impressions of old New York, or contemporary German painting's
bent for the Neo-Romantic idyll - times are getting harder, and young
artists have begun turning back to the styles and standards of by-gone
eras. "Second Modernism" and "New Romanticism" are the catchwords
currently used to describe this return to introspection, sensuousness, and
visual opulence. Yet does quoting the past really testify to a nostalgic
longing to flee from the world in search of ideals or the hope of rescue?
Oliver Koerner von Gustorf on artistic strategies of repetition and
remembrance.
James Ensor: Masken, dem Tod gegenüberstehend, 1888
Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund
(c) VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
Modern Modernism
Even to the exhibition's organizers, the success is almost uncanny. Day after
day, visitors line up in endless queues in front of the New National
Gallery in Berlin, putting up with hours of waiting to get a glimpse of
the masterpieces of New York's Museum of
Modern Art. Even if big American names like
Pollock,
de Kooning, or
Rauschenberg can be seen here, it still seems as though
MoMA in Berlin chiefly signalized European Modernism's return to the
German capital. Masses crowding around
Rousseau's The Dream,
James Ensor's symbolist death dance,
Monet's Water Lilies, or standing reverently before
Matisse's Dance - paintings that have been reproduced million-fold
on postcards, posters, and gift articles. In Berlin, however, the
originals seem to have retained their full aural effect nonetheless. Not
only are people with an otherwise limited interest in art suddenly raving
about Rousseau or van Gogh, while book counters are being rearranged to
make space for coffee-table volumes on Matisse and
Picasso - this year's heavily criticized
Berlin Biennale, which opened the same time as the MoMA show, also
demonstrated that young artists are becoming increasingly involved with
the works of their predecessors.
Mamma Andersson: Nordic Pavillion, 2004
Courtsey Magnus Karlsson Gallery, Stockholm, © Karin Mamma Andersson
"For us, Modernism is like a mother. I return to it again and again," as Karin
Mamma Andersson, a Swedish artist included in the Biennale, explained in
an article in the March issue of the German
art magazine. In her dreamlike paintings, such as
Stairway to Heaven, Andersson quotes 20th-century art history in an
associative way, elevating motifs by
Edward Hopper or
Francis Picabia as though on an imaginary Mount Olympus. Andersson is part
of a current trend among a younger generation of artists who are returning
to Classic Modernism as their second home. "Modernism is our antiquity,"
Roger M. Buergel, the director of the upcoming
Documenta 12, remarked in an April interview with
Spiegel magazine, in which he outlined a few basic features that will
determine the art event of 2007: a commitment to sensuous pleasure,
all-embracing concepts of beauty, contemplation versus agitation. Even if
conceptual art has been dead for decades, the art forms of the post-war
era possess a special justification, constituting a completed epoch that
young artists feel they can turn back to.
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Tim Eitel: Abend, 2003
Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin, Photo: Uwe Walter
Tim Eitel: Untitled, from "In der Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst", 2000
Deutsche Bank Collection
Courtesy
Eigen + Art, Berlin /Leipzig, (c) Tim Eitel,Berlin
"Contemporary painting don't inspire me very much," remarked the 32 year-old
Tim Eitel in Berlin's Tagesspiegel
. Eitel's intense involvement with artists as apparently irreconcilable as
Caspar David Friedrich and
Piet Mondrian, the cool Modernist melancholy adhering to his figures
immersed in art or park landscapes have brought him international success
- together with the other proponents of the "New School of Leipzig
Painters" that formed in Berlin's artist-run
Liga Gallery. The magically charged realism, the synthesis of fiction,
architecture, landscape, history, and zeitgeist celebrated by young German
artists such as
Tilo Baumgärtel or
Norbert Bisky, have become a synonym for a young German painting that uses
both constructed and construed pasts as a projection field for a
present-day perception of reality.
Monika Baer: Zurück aus der Zukunft, 2002
Collection of Mark and Polly Addison
Courtesy Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin
Monika Baer: Untitled, 1994
Deutsche
Bank Collection
Courtesy Galerie
Barbara Weiss, Berlin
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