Human Images for Martians
Press
reactions to the Cracow exhibition "Man in the Middle", and "Design Seen
at MoMA" in Berlin's Kunstgewerbemuseum
Almost 100 works
from the
Deutsche Bank Collection are currently being shown in the
International Cultural Center in Cracow, Poland. Indeed, the cultural
exchange between the two countries seems to be a lively one: it's already
"the fifteenth exhibition of German art we've had," writes the
Gazeta Wyborcza Krakau, to which the Rzeczpospolita remarks
that "sonorous artists' names" and "enchanting works" were selected. Above
all, however, the exhibition's title,
Man in the Middle, animated Polish art critics to once again reflect
upon the human image as it has been expressed throughout the 20th century.
For the Gazeta Krakowska, studying
the works of
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
Otto Dix,
Oskar Kokoschka, and
Franz Erhard Walther demonstrates that art's investigation of the human
being has "often been ambivalent and has varied widely."
Piotr Sarzy´nski resolutely investigates this variability in modern art.
In his article for the Polytika newspaper, he asks: "What would a
Martian say about human existence if a UFO accidentally landed somewhere
among these pictures?" Sarzy´nski likes the art of the early 20th century,
which "addressed the imperfect human, lost in the universe and unsure
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of his true goal," as well as the works from the Deutsche
Bank Collection, which "reflect this struggle in an impressive way." All
the same, he's skeptical when it comes to the social status ascribed to
the painting of the recent past: "Video and installation artists have long
been addressing the dangers associated with genetic engineering. These
themes are still sorely missed in painting." This is why Sarzy´nsky warns
against expecting the exhibition to provide too concise an image of the
human being, regretting the absence of artists "who have been striving
over the past few decades to say something truly important about human
beings: Nan
Goldin,
Ronald Kitaj,
Mimmo Paladino, or
Maria Lassnig."
The
MoMA in Berlin is growing. Since mid-May, Berlin's Kunstgewerbemuseum
has been showing products of 20th-century industrial design in
Design Seen at MoMA - an "augmentation of the larger show that's worth
seeing," as Claudia Schwartz writes in the
Neue Züricher Zeitung. More than anything else, she's impressed
by the
presentation: "Thanks to the MoMA winds, fresh air seems to
have blown through the otherwise fairly stale institution, which presents
less a critical examination than a generously staged reencounter with
certain highlights." Among them are pieces such as
Eileen Gray's lamp design Tube Light from 1927 or
Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair (1929), which more than any
other object embodies "the high art of sitting."
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