GROUP EXHIBITION

Key to presentation will be the inclusion of significant works by Hede Bühl, Adolf Luther and Otto Piene which will be exhibited here for the first time. These artists made significant contributions to realising a new objectivity through their expanded approach to form through their artistic production.

The exhibition begins with early lyrical compositions like Hartung, Schneider, Sonderborg, and Winter, in which they pictured their world through gestural swaths of paint and pushed their formal languages by making their marks with an increasingly nuanced texture. Building up and cutting through layers of paint, they wrestled with their material to realize forms of visual transcendence. Raw yet elegant, their reductive methods produced stirring images which reach beyond representation to achieve increasingly psychological dimensions for their art.

Impasto built up as a physical protrusion in the early work of Christian Megert, who is an important pivotal figure in this exhibition, became ‘Skulptur’ (which is the title of this early series of wall bound works) that reached out towards the viewer. An active part of a self-identified avantgarde, largely centered around the ZERO group and their international colleagues, this generation (Mack, Luther, Piene, Uecker, Bühl, Rickey) began to make their output more physical. No longer specifically painting and now pushing the limits of traditional sculpture, their artistic practices would redefine how audiences encounter their ideas.

In encountering the development of this strand of artists abstract experimentation, a common thread amongst their diverse positions may be the artist’s shared intention for realizing experiences of transcendence. They share the belief that we benefit through human enquiry that reaches beyond quotidian experience and that we may touch on these perspectives through encountering outstanding works of art.