DRESDEN.- Between 1919 and 1921, when art was exploding after the First World War, Carl Lohse (1895–1965) created stunning Expressionist work. But it is all too seldom that the artist and his work received the attention they deserved.

The exhibition Carl Lohse: Expressionist, curated in cooperation with the Ernst Barlach Haus, brings together loans from important public and private collections in east and west Germany, creating the largest show on Lohse to date. Seventy-seven paintings, drawings and sculptures by the artist are on view at the Albertinum. The special exhibition previously held in Hamburg was expanded for Dresden and shows groups of works from the Albertinum and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden’s Kupferstich-Kabinett as well as from the Carl-Lohse-Galerie in Bischofswerda, the Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst Cottbus/Frankfurt (Oder) in Brandenburg, the Kunsthalle Rostock and the Museum Bautzen. Further contributors are the museums of the rural district of Oberspreewald-Lausitz/Kunstsammlung Lausitz in Senftenberg.

Released as a prisoner-of-war and relieved of his military duty, the artist moved from Hamburg to Bischofswerda in October 1919, where he found financial support and went through an extremely creative phase. By the spring of 1921, he had created portraits, landscapes and cityscapes in powerful colours. Lohse’s combination of colours, compared with what was typical for academic painters of the day, were the work of a true daredevil, the rhythm of his images pulsing with energy. His drawings were radically simplified, his plaster portrait busts larger than life, boldly broken up in their form. The artist experimented with the different visual languages of Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism, taking his work as far as pure abstraction. His works impressively bear witness to the moods of a sensitive artist in the crisis-laden post-war period. Lohse’s intuitive and deeply emotional painterly manner is one of the least compromising in the powerful departure taken in art after the November Revolution.

In 1921, Lohse gave up painting and went to Hamburg. When he returned to Bischofswerda after 1928, he began to paint again, and some of these works are included in the exhibition. A selection of works from the 1950s and 60s makes it clear just how little the self-directed artist was interested in the standards of Social Realism.

As part of the exhibition, works by Carl Lohse’s contemporaries and artist friends are also being presented: the painters Marianne Britze, Hans Christoph, Erhard Hippold, Wilhelm Rudolph and the sculptors Christoph Voll, Ludwig Godenschweg and Eugen Hoffmann. Taken from the holdings of the Albertinum, these paintings and sculptures were likewise created in the artistically and politically turbulent time of the Weimar Republic.

All visitors are invited to come to the Farb_Labor, a studio for art education, to explore on a practical and theoretical level the effects of different colours in painting. Hands-on art stations allow for a poetic philosophizing about colour, for experimental exploration of colour contrasts in front of a mirror as well as the designing of magnet boards with portraits painted by visitors in the spirit of Carl Lohse.