Zwei Alter: Jung

About

The confrontation of young painting of the past with that of today will create an exciting context for a visual dialogue, raising a variety of questions: the genre, the medium, the means, and the age of the artists are alike—but what about the motifs, the narratives, the approach, the gesture, the form, and the content of the paintings? How do the works differ from each other? What has changed? What has remained the same? What does the imagery then and now tell us about the times, the people, the society, the art, the world?

Undeniable is that, at the beginning of the 1980s, a group of young painters came together—as a closed or at least associated group—and created a new style or even a new era of painting characterized by mostly figurative, concrete, highly gestural, and vehement mark-making under the label “Junge Wilde”. Is it possible to imagine something similarly cohesive today? Would it be noticeable? Is it even necessary? And does New Fauve painting still—or once again—influence a new generation of young painters?

The young artists of the past represented in the show are now mostly major players of the contemporary art scene: Werner Büttner, Walter Dahn, Rainer Fetting, Georg Herold, Leiko Ikemura, Martin Kippenberger, Helmut Middendorf, Albert Oehlen, Hubert Schmalix, Andreas Schulze, Thomas Schütte, Rosemarie Trockel and others.

Among the emerging artists from today whose work will be on view are: Tom Anholt, Volo Beza, Kamilla Bischof, Amoako Boafo, Emmanuel Bornstein, Peppi Bottrop, Jenny Brosinski, Daniel Correa Mejía, Andrej Dubravsky, Aneta Kajzer, Melike Kara, Jake Madel, Robert Muntean, Sophie Reinhold, Stefan Reiterer, Markus Saile, Erik Swars, Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Antony Valerian, Jan Zöller, Sahar Zukerman.