O Mensch! Mind and body from Expressionism through to the present day

Bach, Bargheer, Baselitz, Brodwolf, Eble, Grosz, Hartung, Heckel, Hüppi, Kirchner, Manfredini, Middendorf, Mueller, Nolde, Panayotidis, Pechstein, Peiffer Watenphul, Purrmann, Rohlfs, Salomé, Scherer, Schmidt-Rottluff, Schultze, Spoerri, Ursula, Winter

What is mankind? What is man? What marks him? What moves and motivates him? Such are the questions that artists, and especially artists, have sought to answer  time and time again. The forthcoming exhibition O Mensch! comprises works produced during a period of 100 years, from the beginning of the 20^th century through to the present day. The exhibited works deal with this complex theme in vastly differing ways and through every medium of expression: painting, sculpture, installation, graphics.

The human being, his thoughts, yearnings and emotions were the central theme of the German Expressionists. In violent forms and colours, they turned their innermost selves outwards, radically and subjectively. They rebelled against the constraints of civilization. The naked human being in the primaeval environment of nature was the outward expression of their inner being.  This mood of awakening at the beginning of the 20^th century, a mood that for the artists of Expressionism marked the birth of a new age, also had its equivalent in Expressionist poetry. In 1911, Franz Werfel began his poem To the Reader with the line My only wish, O Man, is to be akin to thee.  It was a euphoric mood that transcended all boundaries and reached out fraternally to all the peoples of the world. But only four years later the breakout of war put an end to this hymnal euphoria. Instead of falling into one another’s arms as brothers, these artists, like millions of others, were fighting one another in the trenches. The convulsions of the First World War also brought about radical changes and developments in art: such movements as DADA, Surrealism, New Objectivity, Abstraction came into being, and even Expressionism developed further, reacting in its own characteristically radical way to the horror of war and expressing its dramatic consequences even through seemingly commonplace motifs. But the Expressionsts, too, sought a "new style". Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, for example, developed during his years in Davos his own form of abstraction based on surface, colour and rhythm, but never entirely forgoing the figurative and always starting out from the human being.

All this was to undergo a drastic change following the rise to power of the National Socialists, who scorned modernism and decried Expressionism as "entartet". In 1938, a year before the breakout of the Second World War, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, now exiled in Davos, took his own life with a bullet through his heart. The horror and destruction during the following years shook not just the art world but the whole of humanity. Nothing was as it had been before. The Holocaust, the Second World War and the silence of the masses led to a state of speechless in all spheres of artistic expression.

Post-war art was mainly abstract. It was also during the post-war period that the work of Karl Hartung, a sculptor born in 1908, acquired a special status. Initially influenced by Etruscan art and the style of Maillol, Hartung had already adopted an organic, abstract language of form by 1935, but he largely kept it a secret during all the years of his continued residence in Hamburg until the end of the war. During the 1950s, Hartung’s forms erupted brusquely from beneath the hitherto taut, smooth surfaces of his sculptures, but their starting point was always akin to nature, to the metamorphoses of natural living forms, and not least to those of the sensually figural, human form.  

Artists who sought to come to terms with the human figure during these early post-war years did so very hesitantly, struggling to find their own characteristic forms. Bernhard Schultze’s world of total abstraction ultimately gave way to his strange, monsterlike "Migofs". The works of his partner Ursula are populated by colourful yet nightmarish beings. Jürgen Brodwolf found his way to the human figure via squeezed-out tubes of oil paint, while Daniel Spoerri compiled his image of the human being from the residues and traces left on the restaurant table.

It was not until the 1980s that we were able to witness a return – through the "Neue Wilden", Germany’s New Expressionists – to the indomitably expressive gesture of human depiction. Helmut Middendorf, Salomé and Elvira Bach, three West Berlin artists, uninhibitedly devoted themselves to the painting of large-format, garishly coloured human figures. It was a development that Georg Baselitz, who in 1958 had been obliged to leave East for West Germany on account of his so-called "socio-political immaturity", had already anticipated with his gestural, highly provocative figural motifs, which were mostly painted upside down. Nonetheless, the human being had once again become an acceptable motif in the art world.         

The contemporary works to be shown in the forthcoming exhibition include those of the Bern-based Greek artist Nakis Panayotidis, in whose work word and matter, and not infrequently an electric light source, symbolize the illumination of the human being. By contrast, imprints of Giovanni Manfredini’s own body loom out of the black, soot-varnished ground. His existential concern with light and dark thematizes the eternal cycle of life and death.

The exhibition O Mensch! brings all these works together within an exciting complexity of surprising dialogues, confrontations and associations.  Indeed, the exhibition is not only a reflection of the human being in the art of the last 100 years but also illuminates the central aspect of the Henze & Ketterer Gallery’s programme.

Andrea Schmidt M.A.

O man, take care!

O man, take care!
What does the deep midnight declare?
"I was asleep—
From a deep dream I woke and swear:—
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe—
Joy—deeper yet than agony:
Woe implores: Go!
But all joy wants eternity—
Wants deep, wants deep eternity."

Friedrich Nietzsche, from: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Walter Kaufmann

Text accompanying the 96^th exhibition of the Henze & Ketterer Gallery, Wichtrach/Bern, from 14^th January until 5^th April 2012, curated by Andrea Schmidt M.A.