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until 14.11. | #5147ARTatBerlin | Galerie Brockstedt shows from Friday, 11. September 2026 the exhibition “Paintings and Drawings, 1935–1970” by the artist Richard Oelze.
Richard Oelze died in 1980 at the age of 80, living a secluded life in Posteholz in the Weserbergland region, yet his paintings continue to captivate us to this day. The Brockstedt Gallery has been working closely with him since the 1970s and is now presenting a museum-quality retrospective of his oil paintings and drawings.
Born in 1900, this painter is considered one of the most original German artists of the 20th century. His enigmatic visual worlds oscillate between Surrealism, New Objectivity, and a deeply personal way of observing reality. In atmospherically dense landscapes and mysterious constellations of figures, he creates scenes that seem familiar yet elude any unambiguous interpretation.
After training at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, Oelze came into contact with the international Surrealist movement—the group of artists centered around André Breton—in Paris in the 1930s.
There he also met established artists such as Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, who became one of the greatest admirers of Oelze’s work. Ernst greatly appreciated Oelze’s detail-rich, nightmarish paintings and reportedly praised them as “the most exquisite dream paintings.” There were also strong parallels in terms of artistic techniques: Max Ernst’s development of decalcomania (a transfer technique in which pressed paint creates random, organic structures) had a strong influence on Oelze. He used similar principles to perfectly capture psychological phenomena such as pareidolia (the recognition of faces and figures in abstract structures) on canvas.
This encounter had a formative influence on his artistic development. Nevertheless, Oelze developed a distinctive visual language that cannot be reduced to any single art-historical movement.
Among his best-known works is “Expectation” (1935/36): A group of people, with their backs turned to the viewer, gaze intently at an indeterminate event in a gloomy landscape in the distance. The painting captures the tension between anticipation, uncertainty, and latent threat that characterizes Oelze’s work.
His paintings do not tell self-contained stories. Rather, they open up psychological spaces in which memory, dreams, and reality intertwine. Landscapes become landscapes of the soul, and figures become vessels of an elusive expectation. It is precisely this openness that continues to give Oelze’s works an extraordinary presence to this day.
Richard Oelze’s work occupies a special place within German modernism. His paintings do not focus solely on the visible, but on what might lie hidden behind it. These quiet, enigmatic images invite the viewer to look more closely—and to make room for the unknown.
Opening: Friday, 11. September 2026
Exhibition dates: Friday, 11. September until Saturday, 14. November 2026
To the gallery
Title image caption: Richard Oelze, courtesy of Galerie Brockstedt.
Exhibition Richard Oelze – Galerie Brockstedt | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
