With the Eye and the Heart

Conrad Felixmüller from the Hans-Jürgen Wilke Collection

09/11/24—02/02/25

 

Conrad Felixmüller (born 1897 in Dresden, died 1977 in West Berlin), who was educated at the Dresden Academy of Art, is considered an outstanding chronicler of his time, whose artistic gaze was always focused on people and their integration into social structures. Under the impression of the First World War and the revolutionary years of 1918/19, Felixmüller created a series of political papers that astutely reflected the political upheavals and social tensions of that time. As a winner of the Saxon Rome Prize, the staunch communist consciously decided against the traditional two-year stay in Italy and instead undertook a study trip to the Ruhr region to document the precarious living and working conditions of coal workers and their families. In addition to the numerous portraits of his wife and children, from the mid-1920s Felixmüller increasingly devoted himself to portraying friendly intellectuals and art collectors, including personalities such as Max Liebermann and Christian Rohlfs. In the post-war period, after the artist had found a new place to live and work in Tautenhain, Saxony, he took up the theme of the (industrial) worker again and expanded it to include motifs from urban and rural areas. In his final years of work, he was again inspired by the dynamism of the modern city of Berlin to create urban everyday scenes.

 

The stylistic development in Felixmüller’s depiction of people can be understood above all as a reaction to the changing social, political and cultural conditions. Even though many artists reacted in a similar way to these transformation processes in society, Felixmüller managed to find his own, unmistakable form until the end.

The solo exhibition focuses on Felixmüller’s graphic work from the collection of Hans-Jürgen Wilke, the artist’s last printer. This collection includes both prints from all decades of his work as well as original printing blocks and editions of left-wing magazines that Felixmüller supplied with image contributions for several years. The works on display encourage discussion about the development of his visual language in printmaking and question the extent to which his depictions of people and society tend towards stereotyping.

 

Seven graphics by the artist Benjamin Badock (born 1974 in Karl-Marx-Stadt/now Chemnitz) span the present day, revealing the constructed nature of visual clichés in a humorous way.