Eugen Schönebeck | Das Frühwerk | Galerie Judin | 14.09.-21.12.2019

until 21.12. | #2548ARTatBerlin | Galerie Judin presents from 14 September 2019 the exhibition Das Frühwerk by the artist Eugen Schönebeck.

Galerie Judin is pleased to present Das Frühwerk, Eugen Schönebeck’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Eugen Schönebeck (*1936) is one of the most sig­nif­icant post-war Ger­man artists. All the major social, polit­ical and artis­tic upheavals of the time are reflected in his life and work. He grew up in Saxony at the end of the Sec­ond World War, where he begun his artis­tic edu­ca­tion as an apprentice in dec­o­ra­tional paint­ing. He con­tin­ued his train­ing in East Berlin, before leav­ing the young GDR for West Berlin—then the epi­center of non-rep­re­senta­tional art. Together with fel­low stu­dent Georg Baselitz, he devel­oped a new style of fig­u­ra­tive paint­ing. With the large-format por­traits of social­ist lead­ers he made in the mid-1960s, the artist pre-empted issues raised by the protests of 1968.

Only a few years after gra­dua­ting, Schönebeck with­drew him­self from the art mar­ket. He shifted his art to a pri­vate sphere, not least because there was no sociopo­lit­ical utopia to fol­low the move­ment of 1968. He stopped paint­ing in oils, but con­tin­ued to draw—and became the myth­ical pio­neer of new Ger­man fig­u­ra­tion.

Schönebeck produced about 60 paint­ings, and in recent years these have been pub­lished and partly exhib­ited, but the draw­ings, of which there are more than a thou­sand, remain largely unknown. As a result, no light has yet been shed on Schönebeck’s stylis­tic and thematic devel­op­ment, for the draw­ings form a cor­pus of work that is, for the most part, suf­ficient unto itself and rarely mirrored in his paint­ings.

This exhi­bi­tion of the artist’s forma­tive years, confined to selected se­ries of works on paper, is hence a depar­ture into uncharted territory. We fol­low the artis­tic beginn­ings of the young Schönebeck—from his apprentice­ship as a painter-dec­o­rator in Saxony, via his train­ing at the school of dec­o­ra­tive art in East Berlin, to his study of fine art at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in West Berlin. Dur­ing that time, he absorbed the influ­ence of his teach­ers, but was also inspired by art move­ments in Ger­many, the United States and France, walking a tightrope between his own and borrowed con­tent, between East and West Ger­many, and between the fig­u­ra­tive and the abs­tract. His early work thus reveals all the ingre­di­ents that gave rise to his iconic major works of the 1960s, to which we have ded­icated a small selec­tion of works—exhib­ited as a “pre­view” of sorts.

The first vol­ume of a cat­a­logue raisonné of Schönebeck’s draw­ings will be pub­lished in spring 2020.

Vernissage: Friday, 13 September 2019, 6:00 – 9:00 pm

Ausstellungsdaten: Saturday, 14 September – Saturday, 21st December 2019

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Image caption: Bauerndiele, 1954 /  © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019 / Courtesy the artist and Galerie Judin, Berlin

Exhibition Eugen Schönebeck – Galerie Judin | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibition Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin