Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to announce the group show BED AND CLOCK, MOON AND BEACH: Edvard Munch, curated by Christian Malycha in Goethestraße 2/3. The show includes works by Georg Baselitz, André Butzer, Peter Doig, Ida Ekblad, Günther Förg, Adrian Ghenie, Mark Grotjahn, Sophie von Hellermann, Asger Jorn, Sanya Kantarovsky, Adam Saks and Grace Weaver.
In the face of the world’s constant upheavals throughout the 20th century, Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is the painter of life’s fundamental tale of birth, love, fear, and death. Beyond that he is, together with Henri Matisse, one of the greatest colourists of the past 100 years.
Spanning five generations, the group exhibition BED AND CLOCK, MOON AND BEACH picks up the invisible thread, which connects Munch’s oeuvre with our present.
Time and again, Munch is able to spark “vital controversies” and, according to Georg Baselitz, he incorporates “the risk” every new generation has to take, in order “to put itself onto its own feet”. Munch’s liberty and his freshness are unbroken.
The existential inner conflicts of his figures correspond with a tremendous vitality, positivity, and painterly openness, by which, for instance, Günther Förg was heartstricken. It is an openness that can express and make visible the vanishing traces of life.
Due to such manifold expressive qualities, Edvard Munch is to this very day just as unsettling as he is fascinating. Only “this very day”, one’s own time, is always elusive. It’s never just 'here'. It will neither be found in the past nor in the future. It rather seems to encompass the whole span of what was and what is yet to come.
To endure at the heart of this unsteady center of time, every individual experience creates its own, appropriate expression. BED AND CLOCK, MOON AND BEACH affirms that painting in all its cross-generational diversity, no matter if figurative or abstract, gestural or conceptual, still is a sensuous sign of human existence.
Press contact:
Galerie Max Hetzler
presse@maxhetzler.com
Berlin: +49 30 346 497 85-0
www.facebook.com/galeriemaxhetzler
www.instagram.com/galeriemaxhetzler
www.twitter.com/hetzlergallery