Andre Butzer, Ahnenbild 2411, 2006
The Saatchi Gallery is once more mounting a sweeping survey of art particular to a specific country or region (its 2009 exhibition of new art from the Middle East included high-profile artists Ahmed Alsoudani and Kader Attia), shifting its gaze this month to new art from Germany with 107 works on show by 24 artists in “Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany”.
The aim of the show, according to a press statement, is to confirm “Germany’s position as a powerhouse of European contemporary art”, an ambitious thesis as German art has not attracted much attention since the emergence of the New Leipzig School in the early 2000s driven by artists such as Neo Rauch, Martin Kobe and Matthias Weischer.
“The exhibition suggests that Germany is a particularly fertile region for contemporary art with very exciting artists based across the country [in cities] including Berlin, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, Bremen and Cologne,” says Rebecca Wilson, the director of the Saatchi Gallery.
Artists represented include Jutta Koether, Thomas Helbig, Max Frisinger and Friedrich Kunath, along with practitioners based in Germany such as the Norwegian artist, Ida Ekblad.
Established artists such as Isa Genzken, Corinne Wasmuht and Georg Herold also feature, surprising inclusions in an exhibition of purportedly new art.
“Most of the artists in the exhibition aren’t well known, but if you are embedded in the art world, then Genzken and Herold will be familiar names,” Wilson says, adding that the show will give people the chance to engage with a range of younger artists who are beginning to make their mark internationally.
The thematic structure of the exhibition is based on the Gesamtkunstwerk, a term used by composer Richard Wagner in 1849 to define the ideal work of art that would fuse poetry, orchestral and vocal music, dance, drama and painting into the single medium of opera.
The concept has since become a catch-all for “an ideal or universal work of art” that merges different styles and media, from avant-garde to historical, under an all-encompassing, postmodern-esque umbrella.
So which pieces convey this concept most effectively? “The vitrines of Max Frisinger, who was born in Bremen in 1980: these huge assemblages crammed full of found objects are like time capsules of the everyday, and they seem to be making a comment on a very 21st-century condition: excess in our society,” Wilson says.
“At the same time they nod back to Duchamp and Cornell. They also tap into a lo-fi aesthetic with their recycling of found scraps.
Frisinger clearly has an art historical understanding of perspective, representation and abstraction.”
The Saatchi Gallery has developed a high-profile touring programme in recent years, hosting, for instance, an exhibition of new British art, “Newspeak”, at the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg in 2009.
“There are no plans at the moment [to take the German art show on tour] but we are very open to touring our exhibitions,” Wilson says. Gareth Harris
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)