INNER WORLDS

Sigmund Freud and Art

28-10-2023 - 03-03-2024

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, revolutionized the concept of man at the beginning of the last century. His exploration of the “unconscious” became the driving force behind the European avant-garde of his time, and he shaped the culture of the 20th century like no other. For example, his idea that the way human beings feel, think and act was greatly influenced by the unconscious helped to generate the pan-European art movement Surrealism early in the last century.

Among Expressionists, his psychology unleashed a search for the self. In the immediate post-war period, and inspired by Freud, artists of Informalism and Abstract Expressionism both in Europe and America tried to render the creative forces of the unconscious in the material form of painting. The exhibition will be developed in cooperation with the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna and will trace the reception of Freud’s theories in art from the 20th century to today: from creative processes striving to ‘materialize’ inner worlds at the start of the last century, to the existentialist approaches of the post-war period, to Concept Art in the 1980s and feminist stances in post-modernism, all of which reflect, sometimes critically, the heritage of the master of psychoanalysis in the language of art.

An exhibition of the Kunsthalle Tübingen in cooperation with the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna

Curators: Dr. Nicole Fritz and Monika Pessler

with the kind support of the Helmut Klewan Collection

 

Artists of the exhibition:

Herbert Bayer, Hans Bellmer, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Victor Brauner, Barbara Breitenfellner, Günter Brus, Heidi Bucher, Gregory Crewdson, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Delvaux, Maya Deren, Max Ernst, Richard Gerstl, Alberto Giacometti, Walter Gramatté, Julie Hayward, Birgit Jürgenssen, William Kentridge, Käthe Kollwitz, Oskar Kokoschka, Juro Kubicek, Rachel Lachowicz, Robert Longo, René Magritte, André Masson, René Magritte, Hermann Nitsch, Richard Oelze, Hans Op de Beeck, Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray, Arnulf Rainer, Markus Schinwald, Nadja Schöllhammer, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Sammlung Helmut Klewan, Cindy Sherman, Haim Steinberg, Hermann Struck, Raoul Ubac, Umbo, Raphaela Vogel, Kay Walkowiak, Jeff Wall, Franz West, Francesca Woodman, Thomas Zipp, Heimo Zobernig

 

The exhibition is sponsored by

DANIEL RICHTER

06-05-2023 - 03-10-2023

His work deals with reality, which he translates into the language of painting.

Daniel Richter (1962) is regarded as one of the most important painters of his generation. He lives in Berlin and Vienna. Over the past three decades, and with an untiring creative energy and a great delight in experimentation, he has created a comprehensive oeuvre amounting to more than 1,000 works. Daniel Richter’s vibrant and multifaceted stream of paintings draws both from existing pictorial worlds and from inner visions – it is subjective and at the same time collective. By emotionally charging clichés from popular culture, the media, and stylistic elements from art history, Richter carries on the expressionistic gesture of immediacy in a conceptual way and once again questions the possibilities of painting, above and beyond stylistic definitions.

 

Daniel Richter’s artistic beginnings were originally in the field of the applied arts. In the 1980s he designed record covers and posters for bands. From 1991 to 1995 he studied painting at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. By engaging with the figuratively neo-expressionistic painting of artists like Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, Richter went on to develop his own colourful way of painting, which was inspired by abstract-ornamental graffiti. From the outset, this exuded the punk attitude of Hamburg’s subculture.

Around the year 2000, Daniel Richter discovered figuration for himself. This enabled him to translate his experiences with, and his idea of the world into the non-verbal idiom of painting, albeit narratively. Inspired by newspaper photography and history books, he did large-scale history paintings similar to stage sets. Like allegories, these threw light on peripheral figures in society, on social dramas and on crucial historical events. In works like Dogs Planet (2002), Captain Jack (2006) or Fatifa (2005) he processed the violent social reality of demonstrations, war and flight in disturbingly surreal-psychedelic scenarios and nightmarish landscapes reminiscent of science fiction. Alongside his large social panoramas he also did small, more intimate paintings, symbolist self-portraits and still lifes that reflect the conditio humana today.

Since 2015 Richter’s repertoire of motifs and also his painting style have become increasingly more abstract. Motifs such as porno images from the media, or postcards of First World War invalids, seem to provide merely the initial impetus for an aesthetic engagement with formal means, such as colour, line and plane. The latter now seem to be to the fore. Yet the fruits of his latest work phase are anything but l’art pour l’art, although they still reflect the Zeitgeist of a crisis ridden and tense present, given that they are more abstract and less narrative. Not least they have a signal effect and captivate our senses, inviting us to think things through.

The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Tübingen, which is presented more in the form of a retrospective, is the first in many years to again provide a survey of Daniel Richter’s works in Germany – in all its facets. The exhibition has been organised in close collaboration with the artist and has been developed especially for the rooms at the Kunsthalle Tübingen. The main focus is on the figurative impulse in Daniel Richter’s work and on the question of how, again and again over the past three decades, the artist, through his figurative repertoire, has both thematically and stylistically re-addressed the relationship between man, body and society, as well as between internal and external reality.

 

Curator: Dr. Nicole Fritz