Contemporary German Art

Over the last several years, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has assembled a significant collection of contemporary art from Germany.

Next month, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will publicly unveil these newest holdings in Contemporary German Art: Recent Acquisitions. The exhibition features eight large-scale and/or multiple-part projects by artists including Franz Ackermann, Günther Förg, Isa Genzken, Candida Höfer, Katharina Sieverding and Wolfgang Tillmans — artists who, while perhaps still under-appreciated in the United States, have emerged as major figures in European art.

Contemporary German Art opens with a reception from 5 to 8p.m. Friday, Jan. 17, and remains on view through April 20. The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is located in Steinberg Hall, near the intersection of Skinker and Forsyth boulevards. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30p.m. Tuesday through Thursday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays; and noon to 4:30 p.m. weekends. (The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is closed Mondays.) The exhibit is free and open to the public. For more information, call (314) 935-4523.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum traditionally has supported the work of cutting edge and avant-garde artists, dating back to the 1940s, when famed curator H.W. Janson built a collection of modern masterworks by Max Beckmann, Joan Mir ó, Pablo Picasso and many others.

"Basically, we are trying to identify important artistic positions before the market puts them out of reach," explained Sabine Eckmann, Ph.D., curator of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. "This includes artists like Höfer and Sieverding who like many other women artists, have not received the same recognition as their male peers."

Additionally, the recent focus on German art compliments both the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s own already strong holdings of American art of the 1980s and ’90s, including works by Barbara Krueger, Jenny Holzer and Lorna Simpson, as well as the Saint Louis Art Museum’s world-renowned collection of German painting and sculpture from the same period.

"Since the unification of Germany in the early 1990s, Berlin has advanced to become one of the most exciting and energetic centers for the production of contemporary art," Eckmann continued. "The prevailing American perception of modern and postmodern German art is of works created in a subjective, emotional and highly individualistic mode," as represented by early 20th-century expressionists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde and contemporary neo-expressionists like Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. "Yet, while expressionism is a very important strain in German art, it is not the only one."

Artists like Förg, Genzkin and Sieverding represent a cooler, more rational and more analytical style, using unconventional forms and newer, particularly photo-based, technologies to address issues relating to mass media, popular culture and the post-modern urban environment.

Sieverding and Förg, for example, were pioneers in the use of large-scale photography. Sieverding’s imposing diptych Maton (1969), the earliest work in the show, subverts pop culture’s aggressive, disdainful narcissism by pairing a glamorous, almost mask-like self-portrait with a highly polished, full-length (and self-consciousness-inducing) mirror. Förg’s stark Ufizzio Postale, Roma (1982-85), a study of a 1930s Italian post office, subtly demonstrates aesthetic similarities between modernist and fascist architecture.

Works by Ackermann, Höfer and Tillmans, created after the fall of the Berlin Wall, also address themes of architecture, design and urbanity. Ackermann’s Condominium (1994-2002) collects dozens of historic and contemporary images of Berlin on a quartet of wall panels surrounding a Plexiglas container filled with colorful, hand-printed handkerchief maps of the present-day city. Höfer’s Museum für Volkerkunde Dresden 1 (1999) depicts a quiet, unused display room filled with orderly, if slightly off-kilter, rows of bright red exhibition pedestals, while Tillmans’ intimate 15-image Porträt Series (2000) chronicles the cultural milieu that gave rise to the raucous British art world of the 1990s.

Genzken, though widely regarded as a major sculptor — she has thrice participated in the prestigious Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany — once was overshadowed by the career of her former husband, the painter Gerhard Richter. Yet her Little Crazy Column (2002) and Bill II (2001), both on loan from Neugerriemschneider Gallery, Berlin, aptly summarize many of the themes behind Contemporary German Art. Tall, slim and built from mosaic-like panels of glass and mirror (some overprinted with photographs), they seem to refer to modernist skyscrapers yet also possess striking intimacy and fragility.

"Genzken’s work institutes a complex way of seeing, creating new spaces-within-a-space that convey perceptions of architecture as well as of the outer membrane — and imperfections — of the human body," Eckmann concluded. "You cannot see them without seeing yourself, without seeing fragments and distortions of yourself mixed with the environment around you."

Pressetext

Contemporary German Art
Recent Acquisitions at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

mit Franz Ackermann, Günther Förg, Isa Genzken, Candida Höfer, Katharina Sieverding, Wolfgang Tillmans