Bern
GALERIE HENZE & KETTERER | BERN
On now
- "What was a real and directly experienced present or even future for Kirchner is the past for Baselitz. What has happened in the meantime weighs too heavily. Precisely because they were created using the same expressive method, these two artistic works show us their respective different sensitivities all the more vividly. In comparison, the incomparable becomes apparent." (Wolfgang Henze) In the lives of the two great German artists, the year 1938 forms an existential mirror point: the year Kirchner died - the year Baselitz was born. Ingeborg Henze-Ketterer and Wolfgang Henze have pointed out that the lives and careers of the two are strangely mirrored, "in reverse order, upside down, so to speak." Anselm Wagner also describes this incomparable pair as having “two faces”: “While Kirchner looks ahead, Baselitz, in the spirit of postmodernism, looks back to the wealth of art history in order to generate ever more images from existing ones.” In 1905, Kirchner and Brücke called for the opposite—namely, the heightened expression of a new attitude toward life, “immediate and unadulterated,” in work corresponds to a euphoria of progress that has become completely alien to Baselitz and his generation. As mentioned at the outset, the events that have transpired since then weigh too heavily, and Baselitz’s works arise primarily from memory, reflection, and the reformulation of images from the past—always “expressive, but not expressionistic.” Consequently, the so-called “Remix” series emerged beginning in 2005, in which the retrospective exploration of his own body of work is declared an artistic concept and finds expression in drawings, prints, and paintings. The “Remix” woodcuts on display in our exhibition—with titles such as “The Shepherd,” “Painter in a Coat—Two Boots,” or “Poet in Boots”—are all reinterpretations of the significant heroic images that Baselitz created in the 1960s. Rhythmic and commanding, the six large-format woodcuts—Baselitz’s heroes—are distributed throughout the exhibition space, breaking up the works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, which are hung in chronological order and offer a cross-section of his creative years. Kirchner’s centrally hung woodcut “Die Freunde” not only approaches Baselitz’s format in termsDescription
Kirchner and Baselitz Remix: Repetition in the woodcut
Until 30 Oct 2026
- The exhibition is dedicated to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's works of the so-called 'New Style' - a creative phase that the artist developed from the mid-1920s and continued into the mid-1930s. A concise exhibition unfolds over two floors, using selected paintings on the first floor and works on paper in the basement to illustrate the characteristic features, developments and peculiarities of this 'New Style'. The aim is to give this phase within Kirchner's oeuvre the status it deserves.Description
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner reinvents himself. The transition to the 'New Style' in the middle of the Davos years. With the painting “Female nude Green, Blue, and Pink,” 1927/1928
Until 30 Oct 2026
XXL Large-scale works from the postwar period and the present day
Until 18 Dec 2026
