Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Essen

Gustave Courbet’s radical visual language, his sociopolitical aspirations and his influence on modern art remain as powerful today as ever. He rejected the idealised aesthetics of classicism and romanticism, making the lives of ordinary people and reality the subject of his paintings instead. With his uncompromising attitude and innovative painting technique, Courbet is considered a pioneer of modernism – a boundary breaker between art, society and politics. This major retrospective is dedicated to one of the most influential artists of the 19th century, an artistic innovator with a colourful personality who was driven by the pursuit of independence. His political commitment is reflected in his art, especially in his examination of historical events and upheavals in France, which led him to leave Paris in 1873 as a political refugee and flee to Switzerland. The exhibition highlights key stages in the artist’s life and groups of works: self-image and public image, social reality, erotic representation, landscape and exile.

The New Zealand artist Kate Newby (b. 1979) developed a site-specific installation for Museum Folkwang. She selected the transitional area between the museum’s original building, opened in 1960, and the extension completed in 2010. Despite their different periods of construction, both buildings share the formal language of modernist architecture, characterised by clean lines, rectangular courtyards, and expansive glass façades. Glass and concrete, two defining materials of modernism, form the starting point for Newby’s work. In her hands, however, they become fragile, responsive materials that bear the traces of their making. On two glass-pane doors facing the courtyard, the artist has fused vertical hand-drawn lines and numerous fingerprints into the surface. The three-dimensional texture of the glass work Good Sound reacts to light and movement, shifting in appearance throughout the day in response to changing conditions and the viewer’s perspective. The linear forms of the glass installation continue outdoors in the concrete work I’m Asking, situated on the lawn of the museum courtyard. Pale, textured concrete lines extend across the space

The experimental years of non-representational photography were marked by debates and position statements articulated by a young generation. After Gottfried Jäger discovered the book Kunst und Konstruktion (Art and Construction) by computer pioneer and science fiction author Herbert W. Franke in 1958, an artistic exchange developed over the course of decades.

The exhibition shows a selection of works by graduates of the master’s degree programme Photography Studies & Practice at the Folkwang University of the Arts. The two Folkwang institutions are thus continuing a collaboration that began in 2016 with the Stopover series. The exhibition features works by Florian Fäth, Mara Fischer, Patrick Lohse and Nina Mokhtarbaf.

For the first time, an exhibition is dedicated to the former “Department of Islamic Arts” at Museum Folkwang and its resonance in the modern Folkwang cosmos. Even before acquiring important paintings by Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh, museum founder Karl Ernst Osthaus collected arts and crafts from North Africa and West Asia. This group of works had a decisive influence on the Folkwang concept and influenced the art, design and architecture that developed in the context of the museum. Around 300 objects provide the first representative overview of the collection of Islamic Arts at the Folkwang, which was one of the earliest museum collections of its kind in Germany – including shiny ceramics, richly decorated fabrics, a valuable Šāhnāma (Book of Kings) and an internationally significant collection of ibero-islamic tiles, which Walter Gropius himself raved about. Works of classical modernism, European design and contemporary new productions expand the historical spectrum to include current perspectives and issues.