Adolf Fleischmann Retrospective

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The Fleischmann Retrospective furthermore continues the >Classical : Modern< exhibition series, through which South German artists from the Daimler Art Collection since 2001 have been discussed in a broader, European art context.

For our Adolf Fleischmann (1892 – 1968) exhibition – the first Berlin retrospective of his work – we will be exhibiting around sixty paintings, collages and gouaches. The central focus is on his significant late work from his New York period. Dieter Blum (*1936, now living in Düsseldorf) was invited to a shoot for Marlboro in the USA in 1992. This resulted in a series comprising around sixty photos, only fragments of which have previously been exhibited; it was on the basis of this series of pictures that Blum became the most widely and internationally known photographer in this field.

In the context of the Adolf Fleischmann retrospective, we will also be presenting commissioned artworks, created for the Daimler Art Collection by Hartmut Böhm and Andreas Schmid.

Adolf Fleischmann, who is represented by a significant group of artworks in the Daimler Art Collection, was an outstanding abstract artist of Germany and the USA in the post-1945 period. As part of its ‘Classical : Modern’ series, the Daimler Art Collection is holding the first ever retrospective of this artist’s work in Berlin. Featuring around sixty artworks, and spanning three decades of the artist’s work, this comprehensive exhibition presents the artist’s major work from his 1952-1975 New York period, supplemented by representative pictures created in Europe in the 1940s.

The artworks chosen for the Berlin exhibition are largely artworks which were not seen in the Adolf Fleischmann exhibition at the Museum für Konkrete Kunst Ingolstadt (Oct. 2015 – Feb. 2016). This helps the two exhibitions to complement each other – with the addition of the thematically-focused presentation at the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité (April – Sep. 2016, transferred from Ingolstadt) – and to bring Fleischmann’s artwork back into focus for the year 2016.

The German/English publication accompanying this exhibition will offer, for the first time, a thorough examination of Fleischmann’s artwork in the context of the American abstract painting scene of the period. This publication – which may very well reawaken interest in Fleischmann’s artwork in the USA, also – will include early texts relating to the reception of Fleischmann’s American artworks previously published in the 1950s and 1960s in inaccessible contexts.