Rayk Goetze in »The Leipzig Connection«
HDLU, Zagreb, HR
kuratiert von Mark Gisbourne
2. Oktober—8. Dezember 2019
Kunsthalle HDLU Zagreb
10000 Zagreb, Hrvatska
Trg žrtava fašizma 16
Kroatien
Diese Ausstellung findet im Rahmen der Croatian Biennale of Painting statt.
A show of paintings by artists trained in Leipzig over the last twenty-five years represents something of an aesthetic phenomenon. Entitled The Leipzig Connection the exhibition reveals a rich diversity of works representing the international status of four generations of important artists. While in the current presentation the pictorial focus has been placed on the post-communist painting generations.
That is to say beginning with those who studied at the Leipzig Academy, in the 1980s and through the end of the GDR [German Reunification took place in 1990]. However, visual insights into the progenitors of the School, and material to its development, have also been included. From the 1960s onwards what began primarily as a Book and Graphic Arts Academy became a major painting tradition within Eastern Germany. Whether speaking of the early Communist masters such as Heisig, Tübke and Mattheuer, and following on through the »second generation« students Rink, Stelzmann and Gille, a significant and long-lasting figurative tradition of painting was established in Leipzig Academy of Visual.
With the eventual end of Communism and official determinist »socialist realism« art policies, forces of creative diversity allowed the Leipzig School to induct a rich diversity of young potential artists from across Germany throughout the 1990s up to today. As a consequence the painting practices [free of ideology] in figurative painting became extended in many diverse and innovative directions. Whether speaking of the transitional 1980s to the period immediately post-Communism student-practitioners [Rauch, Aichinger and Schröter] and later the »third generation« of independent Leipzig trained painters, Weischer, Schnell, Baumgärtel, Kobe, Ruckhäberle, et al., new avenues of inventive realism, experimental narrative, and essays in pictorial fantasy came into focus garnering many international exhibitions and collectors across the world.
Hence, and since that time, continuous contemporary forms of figuration have developed in many directions, the magic realism of Krüger, the collage paintings of Hofmann, the personal existential realism of Brandl, or the optical realist semi-surreal fantasies of Gernegross. Over four generations an extraordinary range of figurative painted images and creative material practices has been transmitted. The aim of The Leipzig Connection exhibition is therefore to introduce the rich diversity of Leipzig-trained figurative painter-practitioners to the public in Zagreb, and to do so in the context of the Croatian Biennial of
The fact that HDLU has a permanent residency programme in Leipzig witnesses a continuous connection, and in doing so opens the two places to different painting traditions to further stages of fruitful interaction and hybridisation. Commensurate in both size and scope Zagreb and Leipzig represent in other aspects a shared history of related Communism manifested in subtlety different ways of exigency. As an exhibition The Leipzig Connection is should to be seen as an overview of half a century of creative expression, yet at the same time it should be read as an example of liberation, an institutional regeneration from the false hypotheses of ideological painting.
—Mark Gisbourne
Hans Aichinger, Tilo Baumgärtel, Christian Brandl, Sighard Gille, Rayk Goetze, Bernhard Heisig, Julius Hofmann, Martin Kobe, Corinne von Lebusa, Rosa Loy, Ulf Puder, Arno Rink, Johannes Rochhausen, Christoph Ruckhäberle, David Schnell, Rigo Schmidt, Annette Schröter, Volker Stelzmann, Matthias Weischer u.a.