GHK at Art Cologne 2022

We look forward to your visit in Hall 11.1 at booth D-128. During Art Cologne 2022, Galerie Henze & Ketterer will present a juxtaposition of the friends Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner with the typical themes of the artists' association "Brücke", the bathing scene in nature, the portrait, the landscape, peasant life and still life.

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Deepening: The theme of Brücke

As revolutionary as the methods of "Brücke" were in the violent exaggeration of form, color and gesture, as conservative was the selection of the subjects of their representations. And their painting and sculpture consisted exclusively of "representations" of things seen and experienced, pure creations from the imagination are extremely rare. They created in the classical value order of painting, on which Kirchner surprisingly placed particularly great emphasis, figure painting (in nude, bathing scenes in the room and in nature, portrait, dance and music, vaudeville, circus, city life, working life, literary scenes), landscape painting (in natural landscape, seascape, cityscape) and still life (in hunting, fruit, kitchen or flower piece), so the full program of the art of past centuries. Other avant-garde movements were much more selective in choosing their subjects.

Therefore, the Galerie Henze & Ketterer has planned to show the individual themes of "Brücke" in a series of exhibitions, initially during Art Cologne 2022 in a juxtaposition of the friendsErich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner the bathing scene in nature, the portrait, the landscape, peasant life and still life.

The " bathing scene in nature " discovered the "Brücke" artists in the summer of 1909 at the shallow ponds around Moritzburg Castle north of Dresden. Since then, they were drawn again and again, first there, then to the beaches of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, where they repeatedly observed their friends. Kirchner's particular inspiration was the island of Fehmarn in the summers of 1912 to 1914, Heckel's the Flensburg Fjord between the wars, Pechstein's the Curonian Spit. Schmidt-Rottluf was less interested in the bathing scene, whereas Kirchner developed it to a high degree of viability again in the 1920s, even in the gorges of the Davos Alpine valleys.

The "portrait" pervades the entire work of "Brücke" artists equally and equally at a high level, but only when the person was essential to them and/or the head demanded a representation striking.

The "nature landscape" expanded in the work of the "Brücke" artists in the wake of their excursions in 1907 to Goppeln and Golberoda southeast of Dresden and especially through their stays from 1909 at the Moritzburg ponds, in Dangast on the Jade Bay and on the Baltic Sea. In Kirchner's work, landscape painting of the Modern art experienced a first high point in 1912-14 on the Baltic Sea island of Fehmarn and from 1918 in the Davos Alps, where he became the fourth great Alpine painter of the Modern art after Segantini, Hodler and Giacometti. Heckel's great achievement in landscape painting are the numerous paintings and watercolors of his travels across Central Europe between the wars, a true orbis pictus.

Only Kirchner succeeded in depicting "peasant life", the life of mountain farmers, beyond the pure landscape painting of the mountains, thereby making his contribution to the working life image of the 1920s. He appreciated this special form of dealing with nature and the creature in a sensitive way, that he set a monument to it in his painting. Kirchner's largest and most important painting of peasant life dominates the Cabinet Room in the Federal Chancellery in Berlin.

The "still life" also evenly pervades the works of "Brücke" artists, albeit with varying intensity. Mostly flower pieces in the studio, but also hunting pieces with seagulls or shelducks on Fehmarn, with self-carved objects or simply very close seen flowering shrubs in the wild, which thus become still lifes through the cut-out. These beautiful still lives are less conspicuous, but are found more often in the work than it might seem.

Dr. Wolfgang Henze