Fensterbilder. Eduard Bargheer - Rudolf Kügler

In the organizer's words:

About the exhibition

The window motif is a very important theme in painting. Considerations of the image as a window date back to the Renaissance and have been represented in artistic oeuvres worldwide ever since. Whether in the foreground or as a pure background element, the window is far more than just the representation of an opening. It is an element that both separates and connects two worlds. Light, air and landscape meet built interior space. As a kind of optical medium, the window allows us a framed view out of the confines of the home. The cut-out becomes an image, the transparency of the window a carrier of image and meaning.

Two artists, two views, one theme: the works of Eduard Bargheer and Rudolf Kügler tell of the examination of the window as a threshold between inside and outside, occasionally as a source of light or as a picture within a picture. The exhibition invites visitors to locate themselves at this threshold, to let their gaze wander into landscapes and to question how one can shape the view into reality in a pictorial way.

Eduard Bargheer (1901 - 1979), who was involved in international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale in 1948 and documenta I & II, was influenced by Expressionism. He developed a form of transfiguration of reality in which the visual experience is translated into symbolic and two-dimensional "fabric". His unique position, inspired by the harmony of color and light in Paul Klee's Tunis paintings, earned him the title "magician in the intermediate realm" in a review.

Rudolf Kügler (1921 - 2013), an important figure in Berlin's post-war modernism, stands alongside him. He was also represented at international exhibitions, such as documenta II, and received numerous awards. As a student of Max Kaus, Kügler also abstracted from the visible world. His extensive oeuvre ranges from painting and collage to sculpture and he explores architecture and landscape with a special feeling for light and space. Like Bargheer, numerous trips took him to Mediterranean islands (Ibiza and Ischia respectively), where they settled for a time and where their work was strongly influenced.

The exhibition provides an impressive overview of how the theme of windows changed over the course of the 20th century. It shows two parallel, but also different ways of dealing with the poetic and at the same time austere nature of the window, each in their own personal visual language.

Eduard Bargheer (1901 - 1979), grew up in Hamburg-Finkenwärder, briefly studied under Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann and Paul Kayser, 1929-33 member of the Hamburgische Sezession artists' association, moved to Italy in 1939, after the war took up permanent residence in Forio on the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples.

Rudolf Kügler (1921 - 2013) studied at the Weissensee University of Applied Arts in Berlin in 1946/47 and at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1948-54, where he was a professor from 1955-86. In the 1960s, he met Eduard Bargheer, who also held a professorship there from 1963-65. From 1969, regular stays in Ibiza.