All the Best, Dear Hans

On the Occasion of Hans Scheuerecker’s Birthday

Works from the BLMK Collection and Private Collections

 

30/05—23/08/26

 

On the occasion of the 75th birthday of Hans Scheuerecker—a towering figure in the Cottbus art scene—the BLMK presents a solo exhibition featuring key works by the artist drawn from both the museum’s own holdings and private collections. The museum’s collection—comprising paintings, graphic works, posters, and sculptures—has been built up gradually and systematically since the 1970s. It bears witness to the diversity, as well as the continuities and developments, within the artist’s oeuvre spanning a period of nearly 50 years.

 

These shifts in visual language include pictorial gestures that have become increasingly graphic and schematic, as well as a growing focus on a specific spectrum of clear primary colors. Clearly evident here is the artist’s initial orientation toward art-historically charged iconographies, stylistic influences, and the formal vocabulary of the early 20th century. In particular, the expressive gestures—as well as the Impressionist compositional principles—associated with that era gradually evolved within Scheuerecker’s pictorial system into forms of formal reduction and broad, planar color articulations.

 

Amidst all these formal-aesthetic transformations—as well as subtle shifts in the artist’s specific world of motifs and themes—the depiction of the human figure, in all its existential nuances and manifestations, remains a constant.

 

The exhibition is divided into two chapters: one section is dedicated exclusively to the work of Hans Scheuerecker. The majority of the works in this section date from the period spanning the late 1970s to the mid-1990s. On display here are rare, graphically conceived paintings from the mid-1980s that offer glimpses of both open-cast mining sites and urban landscapes. Early portraits and still lifes—in which traces of the artist’s art-historical engagement with the visual concepts of Paul Cézanne, as well as Henri Matisse and Amedeo Modigliani, are clearly discernible—round out the spectrum of Hans Scheuerecker’s first decade of artistic production.

 

In another section of the exhibition, works by the artist are presented that bear the unmistakable stylistic signature of Hans Scheuerecker, yet which—rather than emerging from the secluded sanctuary of the studio—were frequently created within the context of collaborations with cultural practitioners from diverse fields. These posters, performances, ceramics, stage designs, and garments were, in some instances, the direct result of collaborative practices; at other times, they served to complement, expand upon, and support the productions of artists—often younger contemporaries—working in other disciplines.

 

Hans Scheuerecker’s thinking and practice have historically—and continue to this day—extended far beyond the scope of a cultural creator operating solely as an individual artist. Rather, his artistic practice constitutes a form of social positioning that actively fosters community building. Thus, since the 1980s, both Hans Scheuerecker and his art have served as a source of (artistic) orientation for his social milieu.