ART-PRESENTATION: Back to the Present

In the exhibition “Back to the Present” the Städel Museum’s Collection of Contemporary Art is presented anew for the first time, nearly a decade after its opening. A history of art after 1945 fans out proceeding from the central square of the Garden Halls, which cover an area of some 3,000 square metres, beginning with major works of art dating from the recent past to the present. A total of approximately 230 works by 170 artists of various schools, styles and groups reveals surprising comparisons, viewpoints and visual axes between the immediate present and its roots in past decades.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Städel Museum Archive

In the newly conceived arrangement, the main narrative strands of the exhibition “Back to the Present: New Perspectives, New Works –The Collection from 1945 to Today” are continued and linked in a new and more complex way. Wolfgang Tillmans’ formless, gestural photography thus hangs next to works by K. O. Götz and Raymond Hains, while the sculptures by Jessica Stockholder and Isa Genzken are juxtaposed with a fabric painting by Blinky Palermo and a sponge relief by Yves Klein. Daniel Richter’s abstract-figurative painting is interlinked with a portrait by Francis Bacon and Carsten Nicolai with Victor Vasarely’s op art. Dirk Skreber’s seemingly photorealistic painting meets Thomas Demand’s constructed, photographically captured spaces. The presentation includes recent acquisitions and donations, such as works by Victor Vasarely and Miriam Cahn. Most of them were acquired for the Collection of Contemporary Art by the Städelkomitee 21. Jahrhundert in 2007. In the Städel Collection of Contemporary Art, the European Informel is understood as the concept of an entire era. After 1945, it served as a vehicle for expressing not only the aspect of freedom, but also the inability of representational pictorial language to depict the magnitude of the destruction. Abstract, gestural painting dissolves every form, every human figure. The human being is no longer present in the picture as anything but a trace of the painterly act. Yet this multifaceted international phenomenon had already come into play back in the 1920s and ’30s in the works of such artists as Jean Fautrier or Fritz Winter. Works by Wolfgang Tillmans, Michel Majerus and others, for their part, introduce formlessness as an aesthetic category that has persisted in art to the very present. And finally, this universal pictorial language transcends the boundaries of painting: works by Raymond Hains and Dieter Roth unite in a surprising manner in the dissolution of self-contained form and even in cross-media pictorial concepts.  Parallel to this development, several of the artists represented in the collection – among them Georg Baselitz, Eugen Schönebeck and Leon Golub, but also Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti with their images of deformed bodies, saw to it that the figure by no means ever entirely disappeared. On the contrary, they were among those artists who set out in search of new forms of figural expression. Between figuration and abstraction, a new representationalism emerged, a new way of perceiving and depicting the human image. Works by artists like Miriam Cahn and Daniel Richter testify to the fact that this search is still in progress today. Painting after 1945 increasingly leaves the canvas – but does not stop being painting. The Garden Halls vividly illustrate this expansion of the panel painting into space from the Nouveaux Réalistes, Zero, and American Minimalism to the present. Yves Klein’s sponge reliefs, Günther Uecker’nail paintings, and Dieter Roth’s assemblages, for instance, revert to modernist concepts while at the same time pointing to the future. The works by John M. Armleder, Isa Genzken, Jessica Stockholder and others show how art increasingly conquers the surrounding space and makes its way into everyday life. The presentation also mirrors the reciprocal relationship between painting and photography across the decades. From Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students, for example Jörg Sasse  and Andreas Gursky, to artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans and Angela Grauerholz, it spreads out a variegated spectrum of new pictorial strategies – between the claim to documentation and photographs entirely removed from any reality. In the process, it does not emphasize the differentness of the two seemingly competing mediums, but rather their mutual influence. Photography, with its supposed claim to the reproduction of reality, becomes a medium in its own right that exploits its potentials to the fullest. This discourse continues to take on ever greater relevance, in particular in the context of the digital age. In a reciprocal exchange, photography adopts pictorial strategies of painting and vice versa.

Info: Curator: Dr Martin Engle, Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, Frankfurt, Duration: 19/5/20- , Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Sat-Sun 10.00-18:oo, Thu-Fri 10.00-21:00, www.staedelmuseum.de