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.