THE HAGUE.- What would the Dutch flag look like if the three colours were divided on the basis of wealth in the country? In 1972 German artist KP Brehmer reworked the German flag in this way, highlighting the unequal distribution of wealth in West Germany. The flag was hoisted at Documenta 5, and will be one of the iconic works on display in KP Brehmer: Real Art – Fake News at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, the artist’s first ever retrospective in the Netherlands.

“I myself see art, along with science and philosophy, as a tool for appropriating reality.” - KP Brehmer

The work of KP Brehmer (1938-1997) includes paintings, prints, drawings and films that resemble diagrams, infographics, abstract art or advertising posters. There is an irony in his visual idiom which comments on the art world, the media landscape and society. This was the artist’s way of making the viewer aware of the influence of images, statistics and other ‘scientific sources’. He was convinced that a deliberate intention lay behind every image. More than twenty years after his death, his observations are surprisingly relevant in today’s world. In collaboration with the Neues Museum in Nuremberg, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and Arter Istanbul, the Gemeentemuseum presents the first major retrospective of the work of KP Brehmer in the Netherlands.

With his politically tinted work KP Brehmer was an important representative of the ‘capitalist-realist style’ in the mid-1960s, along with artists Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter and Wolf Vostell. The movement bore a resemblance to pop art. The group’s best-known work is Korrektur der Nationalfarben (‘Correction of National Colours’, 1972), the German flag mentioned in the introduction, in which the three colours black, red and yellow are shown in bands of different sizes that visualise the distribution of national income in West Germany.

Prompted by advertising and political propaganda, Brehmer often responded to the everyday visual world in West Germany in his work in series, his prints and his special editions, which refer to fascism, the threat of communism, environmental pollution and war. His work also commented on the way women are depicted in advertising, as in Display 25. The Feeling Between Fingertips of 1967, which he imbued with a sharp irony, adding cucumber and carrot seeds to the image.

In the 1970s Brehmer attracted attention with his home-made graphs with their unusual legends and debatable research results. In Colour Geography No. 6, for example, he shows where certain hair colours are most prevalent in France (the lightest brown, light brown, slightly darker brown, dark brown), emphasising the lack of substance in this news. Like the flag, this statistic is part of a series in which he explored the meaning of colour as a symbol in various forms.

In Colour Geography after Mondrian he combines the grid of a Mondrian painting with that of a map to visualise the world on the basis of four shades of blue that represent ice blue, azure blue, Parisian blue (Paris being the centre of the art world) and Russian blue.

In another work Brehmer visualises a scientific study of the behaviour and emotional state of an industrial worker. He then transforms his diagram into musical notation, thus giving the worker a voice.

One key element of his rich, idiosyncratic body of work is his postage stamps. Using magnification, overprinting and altered motifs, he issued his own stamps, demonstrating both the propaganda value of postage stamps – a Hitler stamp from the Nazi period, for example – and his view that art is always a reproduction. He believed that, by the twentieth century, there were no longer any original images.

Brehmer was born in Berlin, trained as a printer and studied graphic art. In 1971 he became a professor at the Hochshule für Bildende Kunst (Art Academy) in Hamburg, and in 1987 and 1988 he was guest lecturer at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. The exhibition in The Hague has been put together in collaboration with the Neues Museum in Nuremberg, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and Arter Istanbul, and it clearly shows how Brehmer’s work brims with serious social criticism, alongside his cheerful irony and humour. With his creative spirit and powerful imagination, he unmasked images and ideas, and his themes touch upon those of today.

A catalogue in German, English and Turkish will accompany the exhibition. Published by Koenig Books London, 2018, it costs €29.