The small, private museum No Hero, in the town of Delden in the east of The Netherlands, presented an interesting and thought-provoking exhibition from April 2023 to April 2024, of paintings – and some sculptures – from the former DDR. Called ‘Die Uberraschung’ – the Surprise -, it shows some 60 works by East German artists from before and after the demise of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, or at least it claims to do so.
And there are indeed works from before 1989, but in reality most works are from after 1989 (I haven’t dome a statistical analysis, but it seems to me the vast majority). Which is by no means a judgement on quality; as the museum owner and curator (?) explains in a video, artists in the DDR were taught a vocation, were trained thoroughly in painting techniques, and were capable professionals – which he, although not with so many words, contrasts with the leading trend in the West at the time, of conceptualism, where accurate figurative representation was not so important anymore. And the artists of the former DDR are clearly talented, no doubt. But it would have been interesting to also compare the subject matter, in how far artists were limited by the political regime, and whether they were trying to find the limits of what was permissible. And how that looks like, today.
The comment in the curator’s video, that they were not suddenly painting other things after the wall came down, is not convincing enough: I wonder whether a painting like ‘Strasse XX’, by Volker Stelzmann, would have been acceptable at the time, depicting transvestites and gaudily dressed women (unfortunately, this work is one of the few without the year it was painted). Rolf Handler’s 1987 painting ‘Beschneidung der Engel’ (Circumcision of the Angel) does seem to be substantially critical, depicting an angel whose wings are being clipped, to be interpreted as the inability to escape from the DDR, and at the same time as the straightjacket applied in the west for those who fled the east. And what to make from Bernard Heisig’s 1979 work ‘Hure, Morder und Soldaten’. Propaganda? Hans Ticha, with ‘Polit-Zirkus’ does seem to be voicing criticism, as early as 1982, if only in the title of the work.
My favourites are some of the more modern works, 21st-century. Below a few examples.
