25.09.2026 – 03.01.2027
Roger Garaudy, a professor of philosophy and member of the French Communist Party, once called for a “Realism Without Shores” (1963), advocating greater aesthetic freedom within Marxist art theory. His approach broke with the paradigms of partisanship, affinity with the people and comprehensibility, which many artists in the GDR and Eastern Europe had come to regard as dogmatic. Yet his open understanding of realism was at odds with socialist cultural policy, which dismissed Garaudy’s ideas as bourgeois revisionism. Nevertheless, his ideas had a lasting impact, particularly in the GDR, enabling artists to create pictorial spaces that subtly undermined the political and aesthetic prescriptions of Socialist Realism.
The exhibition “Spaces of Longing”, featuring around 50 works on loan and works from the Neubrandenburg Art Collection, explores how this freedom manifested itself in the art of the GDR: artists experimented with spatial constructions inspired by Pittura Metafisica, with magical scenes that unfold before the viewer like dream worlds, as well as with grotesque landscapes and figures reminiscent of medieval depictions of demons. In narrative, mythical compositions, enigmatic beings and poetic worlds emerge, developing European Surrealism further and at times transcending or abstracting it. Labyrinthine, vertiginous spaces detach the paintings from reality and open up utopian realms. Architectures appear stage-like, while scenes resemble carefully staged theatrical performances. The human figure appears as a visionary, transforms itself, merges with its bizarre surroundings or attempts to escape them. The works serve no political or social purpose; instead, they create an artistic refuge in another reality.
Magical Realism and Surrealism enabled artists in the GDR to develop a visual poetics beyond thematic or formal prescriptions, in which hope, doubt, resistance and resignation became the central themes of pictorial worlds that move beyond conventional representations of reality into the realm of the magical – and which have lost none of their fascination to this day.
Works by Werner Tübke, Clemens Gröszer, Willi Sitte, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Annette Krisper-Bešlić, Wolfgang Peuker, Hubertus Giebe and Peter Sylvester are on display on loan from the Kunstsammlung der Berliner Volksbank.