SO VIEL SILBER IM GRAU. Kunst aus der DDR
In the organizer's words:
The art collection of the city of Jena is a comparatively young collection that is essentially based on the material and conceptual heritage of the former Jenaer Kunstverein. The sometimes abrupt upheavals under changing strategies and without its own showrooms had a detrimental and lasting effect on the collection over the decades. Nevertheless, there were always periods of further development, including the 1970s and 1980s - despite all the regulations in the cultural sector of the GDR. After the losses caused by the "Degenerate Art" campaign and the devastation of the Second World War, the Jena Art Collection was not only able to recover during these years, but was also continuously expanded and thus reshaped. The focus was on the region, the art centers in central Germany - Dresden, Leipzig, Halle - and Berlin. Acquisitions from abroad were impossible and there was usually a lack of funds for major works. Nevertheless, it was possible to find something special and give the collection its own profile. This was involuntarily linked to the Kunstverein's collection, which focused on Expressionist prints. The art of the GDR was also first and foremost a flowering of the graphic arts, an art of overt and covert messages that often surveyed the terrain in subtle nuances influenced by literature. The collection includes many outstanding individual sheets, as well as elaborately designed and printed series in portfolios by some of the most important artists in this field, such as Alfred Traugott Mörstedt, Barbara Lechner and Gerhard Altenbourg. At the same time, prominent representatives such as Wolfgang Mattheuer, Willi Sitte and Werner Tübke can also be found here.
The Jena Art Collection has hardly any major works, but in addition to important paintings by Bernhard Heisig, Alexandra Müller-Jontschewa and Horst Sakulowski, it contains a collection of paintings worth discovering, for example by Emma Hübner, an artist who is only known to a few outside of Jena. The uncrowned local hero of the Jena painters was undoubtedly Lothar Zitzmann, who was able to set his own accent in painting with his balanced volumes. Alongside Kurt Hanf, who is still present in Jena today through many public commissions, the works of Gil Schlesinger or Gerd Wandrer could only be found in obscurity, away from the state-legitimized cultural production.
At the beginning of this year, the Jena Art Collection received a partial bequest from Christel and Hartwig Prange. Christel and Hartwig Prange initiated and ran the "Kleine Galerie" in Jena in the 1980s and acquired numerous works by Dieter Goltzsche, Michael Morgner, Charlotte Elfriede Pauly, Max Uhlig and other artists for their private collection. Some of these are presented in our exhibition and exemplify the intellectual and aesthetic curiosity that led many people to art.
At around thirty percent, the collection of art from the GDR is a significant part of the Jena Art Collection and is being presented for the first time in excerpts with the aim of reassessing this collection. The museum's holdings include works by quite a few artists - such as Elke Hopfe, Hans Ticha and Horst Peter Meyer - from the years of the GDR and the period after. Many of the exhibited works are being presented for the first time and bear witness to an art space that surprises and wants to be rediscovered through the wealth of handwriting and the topicality of the visual languages. We very much hope that our exhibition will contribute to an understanding of the artistic achievements of those years and pay tribute to them.
On display are works by 134 artists.
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