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.