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until 13.04. | #4166ARTatBerlin | Galerie Friese shows from 10. February 2024 (Opening: 09.02.) the exhibition “Begegnung zweier Künstler in den 1950er Jahren” from the artists Willi Baumeister & Georg Karl Pfahler.
Willi Baumeister (1889-1955) was one of the pioneers of 20th century art who did not care about apparent opposites such as abstract or figurative. He was always concerned with the whole of art, which, if taken seriously, means its interweaving with human history. Baumeister’s legacy as a teacher is just as important as his work: he initially taught at the Städtische Kunstgewerbeschule in Frankfurt from 1928 until he was dismissed by the National Socialists in 1933. In 1946, Baumeister, who worked undercover during the war years and earned his living as a commercial artist, was appointed professor at the newly reopened Stuttgart Art Academy by the then Minister of Culture, Theodor Heuss.
He was the symbolic figure for the new beginning of the art academy, integrated the teachings of the Bauhaus into his lessons and advocated the morally based freedom of art. His programmatic essay “The Unknown in Art”, published in 1947, and his position at the Darmstadt Talks in 1950 further cemented his reputation as an advocate of modernism in Germany.
Georg Karl Pfahler, Formativ Nr. II a, 1959–1960, Mischtechnik auf Leinwand, 110 x 100 cm, Foto: Pfahler Archive
Georg Karl Pfahler (1926-2002) also met Baumeister at the Stuttgart Art Academy and studied in his class until 1954. Pfahler’s early works show the influence of his teacher and his late work of black floating forms. But Pfahler soon found his own cosmos. In 1958, he began his extensive group of works “Formativ”, which would serve as the basis and conceptual source for his entire later oeuvre: painterly compositions of colour blocks and fields that explore the relationship between colour and form in sensitive acts of balance.
Today, Pfahler is best known for his later, geometric colour-form compositions with sharp outlines, which shaped his reputation as the main representative of hard-edge painting in Europe. From the very beginning, he was not only interested in the dynamics within the pictorial space, but also in the relationship of his paintings to the surrounding space. In doing so, he pursued a larger, social concern: to create social spaces with art. From 1965 onwards, he created architectural “colour space objects” in interior and exterior spaces, such as the walk-in colour spaces in the German Pavilion at the 1970 Venice Biennale and his “Palaverhäuser”. This dimension of Pfahler’s art also makes him appear today as a pioneer of later art trends interested in social interaction, such as “Relational Art”.
Vernissage: Friday, 09. February 2024, From 7 to 9 pm, Introduction with Klaus Gerrit Friese, 8 pm
Exhibition period: Saturday, 10. February – Saturday, 13. April 2024
To the Gallery
Image caption: Willi Baumeister, Schwarzer Fels, metaphysisch, 1955, Öl, Kunstharz, Spachtelkitt auf Hartfaserplatte, 65 x 81 cm, Foto: Reinhard Truckenmüller, Courtesy Willi Baumeister Stiftung
Exhibition Willi Baumeister & Georg Karl Pfahler – Galerie Friese | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries| ART at Berlin
