In cooperation with the Horst Janssen Museum Oldenburg and Galerie und Verlag St. Gertrude.
The work of Horst Janssen (1929 – 1995) is often compared with the art of Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt or Francisco de Goya. In cooperation with the Horst Janssen Museum Oldenburg, the Kunstforum der Berliner Volksbank is showing around 100 of the most beautiful and important drawings, lithographs, etchings and woodcuts from Horst Janssen’s early work. It is the lesser-known Janssen who can be discovered in the exhibition. The shy, brittle, introverted Janssen who draws manically, developing a power of invention that creates microcosms in the smallest of spaces with inexhaustible, meticulous, detail-obsessed strokes.
These works from the early oeuvre of the “millionaire”, as he called himself, are certainly among his most ambitious and important works. The early ones are complemented by twenty-seven later works by Galerie und Verlag St. Gertrude. The exhibition features early lithographs depicting sensitive portraits, erotic “flesh drawings” and multiple series of etchings, such as “Nana,” “L’heure de Mylène” and “Harald in the Park,” whimsical and salacious at the same time. But also works from the artist’s so-called “scribbling phase,” which are strongly inspired by Art brut, the “raw, unadulterated art,” or large, colour-intensive woodcuts depicting people and animals.
For the first time since 1993, the exhibition at the Kunstforum der Berliner Volksbank, which was organised in cooperation with the Brücke-Museum Berlin, was once again devoted to the complete works of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who is known for his fascinating play with forms and colour.
With around 100 works from the Brücke Museum’s holdings, the retrospective approached Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s oeuvre in a special way, opening up a dialogue between his paintings, watercolours, drawings and rare sculptures of his own, as well as African and Oceanic masks, which repeatedly served the artist as pictorial models. African and Oceanic tribal art was of immense importance for Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s own artistic work. He used their “primitive” formal language to find an approach to the origins of all art and to achieve an increase in the expression of the “sensation before the seen”.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff regarded the various techniques in his work as independent media with individual expressive power and specific aesthetic potential. He made this clear very consciously by working on a variety of motifs in different processes. At the same time, this approach emphasised the different levels of reality in his compositions, especially in his still lifes. The juxtaposition of the non-European artworks from Schmidt-Rottluff’s collection, some of which he arranged for the still lifes, with the artist’s own works thus allows a unique insight into his working method.
As a founding member of the artists’ group “Brücke” at the beginning of the 20th century, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff shaped the dawn of modernism with Expressionism. In 1964, he initiated the construction of the Brücke Museum, which was opened on 15 September 1967 and celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s painterly work spans almost 70 years.
Hans Purrmann is one of the most important German painters of the first half of the 20th century.
A contemporary of Pablo Picasso, Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee and Max Beckmann, he developed his very own style in the “interplay of colours,” as Hermann Hesse wrote in a poem dedicated to the artist.
It is especially the strongly coloured still lifes and landscapes that art connoisseurs appreciate and admire. Hans Purrmann was the most powerful representative of the German Matisse school and distinguished himself by a luminous colour painting full of harmony and light.
On the 20th anniversary of the Kunstforum in Budapester Straße, Berliner Volksbank showed a cross-section of the Kunstsammlung der Berliner Volksbank after the merger of the cooperative banking institutions with new collections.
After 15 years of collecting art, the exhibition provided a comprehensive insight into the GrundkreditBank collection for the first time. The exhibition was created shortly before the merger of GrundkreditBank – Köpenicker Bank with Berliner Volksbank. From 2000, both collections operated under the name Kunstsammlung der Berliner Volksbank.
The theme of the 1997 Berliner Festspiele was “Images of Germany”. For this purpose, the Berlin gallery owner Dieter Brusberg curated an exhibition on five artists from East Germany at the Kunstforum on behalf of the GrundkreditBank. Gerhard Altenbourg, Bernhard Heisig, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Harald Metzkes and Werner Tübke were represented with works from the GrundkreditBank collection and loans.
Six months after the reunification, the Kunstforum der GrundkreditBank showed works from the GDR that had been purchased between 1985 and 1990. The exhibition was created against the background of the then-current “picture dispute” between East and West and also addressed the role of artists in the GDR.
