BERLIN.- Contemporary Fine Arts is presenting an exhibition of works by Bernd Koberling featuring paintings from the years 1968 to 1992.
As one of the few native Berliners (born in 1938), Koberling has never shown an interest in the themes of urban life. His Nordic landscapes and sceneries are created in Berlin, though he repeatedly escapes the city through travels to Iceland, Scotland, and Lapland. Volcanic terrains, block lava rock, cormorants, nesting birds, landscapes, beach workers, whales, and metamorphoses—these subjects seem far removed from urban reality. In contrast to the dominant urban world, he presents a self-contained and ever-present natural reality. It is the immediacy of nature, more tangible in Arctic regions than in landscapes shaped by human intervention, that defines his work.
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And yet, does a painter today not embrace escapism when depicting poppies, cormorants, whales, or river estuaries in the midst of a metropolis? The question ultimately turns on the questioner, for perhaps escapism is the only salvation for those striving to survive in the complexity of city life. Koberling consciously affirms this kind of escapism; even the ivory tower has its positive function, as it offers individuals the opportunity to reconnect with the elemental.
This exhibition has been made possible through the generous cooperation of a Berlin-based private collection. Over nearly 50 years of collecting, with acquisitions spanning this entire period, a body of more than 40 paintings and numerous works on paper has been assembled. From this collection, we have selected 14 paintings for the exhibition. It is also important to note that all works on display are not for sale.
For Bernd Koberling, CFA, and the Berlin audience, it is a rare privilege to experience these works once again.
Our deepest gratitude goes to the Berlin Private Collection, whose remarkable openness and commitment have made this exhibition a reality.
Text by Kay Heymer »Determining Position« published in the catalog Bernd Koberling: Works 1963–2017, MKM Museum Küppersmühle for Modern Art, Duisburg, 2017.
The painter Bernd Koberling can look back on sixty years of artistic development – a period in which the prevailing notions of art have undergone dramatic change, yet still remained constant. The visual arts constitute an essential arena in shaping the development and impact of cultural memory and serve as a visualisation of ideas and emotions for overcoming our quotidian reality. Their radiant aura is possessed of the capacity to penetrate deeper into time and space. (1) A work of art exists inherently within a state of tension between novelty and universality; the artist must find his own language in order to accommodate both these poles. The confrontation with tradition and the present cannot be negotiated without conflict or fracture, but solely through overcoming resistance, while at the same time maintaining a respectful and disrespectful attitude towards predecessors. For the generation of artists to which Bernd Koberling belongs, the experience of the total destruction and the wholesale relativising of cultural values, occasioned by twelve years of fascism and the Second World War, was highly instrumental.Bernd Koberling decided to become an artist in 1957, before enrolling in 1958 at West-Berlin‘s Academy for Fine Arts, where he studied under Max Kaus – an Ex-pressionist of the second generation. After the war, Karl Hofer rebuilt the academy and picked up on its pre-Nazi era focus on Expressionism and classical modernism. In the same year, Koberling attended the ground-breaking exhibition »New American Painting«, which proved to be a seminal experience – not only for him.An entire generation of European artists were influenced by this travelling exhibition. (2) This landmark project comported seamlessly with the campaign under whose rallying cry »abstraction as a global language« came to dominate new art in Europe at the time, and which was deployed as the central metaphor for the culture of the free Western world against the socialist dictatorships in the USSR‘s sphere of influence. (3) Even leaving aside the covertly propagated political implications, the impact of new American painting on show here was for many young artists as liberating as it was unsettling.
Bernd Koberling was particularly impressed by Sam Francis and Willem de Kooning. Having absorbed the chromaticism of Ernst Wilhelm Nay prior to the exhibition and having studied Emilio Vedova‘s special form of Cubism under the artist himself, it was now the intensive colours of Sam Francis‘s monumental works, such as the »strange warm orange, combined with violet in the painting Big Red (1953), a canvas measuring 305 x 198 cm, which truly »bowled him over« and eclipsed the impression left by European painting. (4) On view were also a stunning black work by de Kooning from 1948, the two pictures Woman I and Woman II from 1950-52, together with two more recent abstract canvases. Koberling was thrilled by the raw energy of these images and by the American painters‘ treatment of colour and their ability to present previously unseen, i.e. genuinely new, paintings. Recalling this experience in later years, Koberling also highlighted the confidence and maturity of these painters, who, whilst unknown to him as a young artist, came to play a huge role in his development. (5)
Now Koberling had to reconcile these new and overwhelming impressions with his experience of the European tradition. Shortly before commencing his studies, he attended an exhibition in 1957 of the Jewish-Polish painter Jankel Adler, hosted in a house on Lützowplatz. Here, he encountered the works of an artist who had preoccupied himself intensively with Picasso‘s Cubism and responded sensitively to it. Koberling saw in Adler‘s reaction the embodiment of modern art – a notion which was subsequently shattered by his experiences at the American exhibition.But as enthusiastic as Koberling was about Abstract Expressionism, it did not wield a normative influence on his artistic practice, as he was not prepared to forego content in his painting. Works completed under the auspices of the »Gruppe Vision« (1960-61) and in England between 1961 and 1963 clearly illustrate that he was negotiating his own very distinct path between his European roots and the vigour of American abstraction.He needed figuration as a form of resistance – in conjunction with de Kooning, an American artist who interested him keenly, and who was also reluctant to fully dispense with the object.
Working as part-time as a cook until 1968 whilst training as painter, Koberling began at an early stage to immerse himself in nature, travelling to Lapland in order to paint anglers and fishermen. Koberling became an artist whose images reflected and assimilated his experiences in the natural world. In the catalogue accompanying Koberling‘s 1978 solo exhibition in Berlin and Leverkusen, Christos Joachimides titled his essay »Images from Nature« and reiterated an observation he had initially made back in 1969: »Landscape is deployed by him to signify a reality which does not exist.« (6) Koberling is a landscape painter, whose paintings, however, are not a faithful reproduction of what he sees, but which sublate their motifs. The content of his paintings has always remained multilayered and referenced the fundamental fault lines between the experience of nature and artistic activity.
Koberling was not alone among his generation in his ambivalent attitude towards motif and abstraction – other artist friends such as Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz also wrestled during this time to fill their paintings with content, whose pertinence and validity are, however, questionable. Lüpertz invented the form of the dithyramb in order to transform objects, such as tents or comic figures, into abstract hieroglyphics, and in 1966 Georg Baselitz began to cut or tear up his motifs into fractured images. Koberling experimented with various techniques to attain valid images: »In the meantime, I had decided to only paint landscapes, devoid of people and their handiwork. I experimented a great deal, continually searching for the means to find a new way of depicting the landscape, or to be more precise, one that had more to do with me. […] I preferred to paint as un-pretentiously as a house painter, rather than regress into the aesthetic of Informel. In this phase of my quest, every minute spent painting was full of surprises; coincidence brought me much further than defined intentions«, (7) he wrote in 1977, looking back at his work completed around 1965. Compositional simplification and concentration seemed to offer a way out after he had painted a series of Marshland Flowers in early 1965: »Painterly spontaneity and thematic, figurative intention posed for me an irreconcilable contradiction. The unique qualities of the natural world with its light and ineffable colours continued to elude expression.I went to the other extreme and painted the works Weiße Wolke and Gelbe Woke, Gletscher and Diagonaler Baumstamm. I left the individual forms unheeded. The mountain is in itself a triangle. For water I used red, the cloud was yellow, the contours of the mountains black on a white ground. I really liked these paintings. They had the serenity and freedom I was striving for. I told myself that the more intimate the painting, the more primitive the means.« (8)
Shortly afterwards, he invented the »Overstretching«, a new painting technique, with which he produces paintings using several strips of nettle cloth, spanned over with transparent plastic foil, in which the painterly gesture recedes to evoke a becalmed and tranquil ambience, which subtly subverts the impression of the landscape. This phase can partly be traced back to his experiences with Pop Art, the principal protagonists of which, such as Allan D‘Arcangelo and Roy Lichtenstein, worked with fragments and cliched forms of landscapes, which Koberling juxtaposed with his own concept of landscape.
After this phase of »Overstretchings« – and following a crisis during an Italian residency at the Villa Massimo in Rome, where he fashioned politically aesthetic language paintings which later resulted in the Terror Painting – with Paintwash, Koberling returned to painting directly. Eventually, he created a holistic work, in which he translated onto canvas his immediate impressions of nature in a variety of ways, demonstrating finely calibrated nuances of painterly expression with an extraordinary spectrum of emotional states. Bernd Koberling ranks among the most important German painters of his generation.
His paintings are exemplary visualisations, the enduring impact of which extends far beyond the historical conditions of their genesis. Today, his oeuvre stands proud and confident, no longer requiring classification as belonging to a particular school, movement, or style.The aspiration promulgated in the title of the 1981 exhibition »A New Spirit in Painting« can today be regarded as fulfilled. And Bernd Koberling embodies this spirit as well. Over the past five decades, Bernd Koberling has established himself as a painter of world renown. It is, however, interesting to expand a little on a number of milestones charting the impact of his painting and his role in the art scene. Together with Markus Lüpertz, K. H. Hödicke, and Lambert Maria Wintersberger, Koberling was a member of the shortlived artist group and gallery»Grogörschen 35«, which from 1964 onwards played an important role in the Berlin art scene. In 1965, René Block organised a retrospective of this gallery and in 1967 was also an initiator of the exhibition »Hommage à Lidice«, for which he invited twenty-one artists to donate works in commemoration of the destruction of the village Lidice by the SS, as a reprisal for the murder of the »Reichsprotektor« for Bohemia, Reinhard Heydrich. The exhibition was initially presented in René Block‘s gallery in Berlin in October/November 1967 and later in Jindrich Chalupecky‘s Spalá gallery in Prague, opening on 3 July 1968. In addition to Koberling, the show also exhibited works by Hans Peter Alvermann, Joseph Beuys, Gotthard Graubner, Jörg Immendorff, Konrad Lueg, Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke, Chris Reinecke, Gerhard Richter, and Stefan Wewerka. (9) This was one of the first important exhibitions in which Bernd Koberling participated.
In 1969, he took part in a highly regarded series of exhibitions: »14 x 14,« mounted in the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; in 1972 in the »Szene Rhein-Ruhr« in Essen and in the survey »The Berlin Scene«, organised by Christos Joachimides in London. These were followed in 1975 by the group exhibition »8 in Berlin« in Edinburgh, and in 1978 »13° East. Eleven Artists Working in Berlin« in London‘s Whitechapel ArtGallery. In the intervening period, Reinhard Onnasch had assembled a collection of thirteen paintings which – in 1978 in conjunction with the exhibition »Aspects of the 60s. From the Collection of Reinhard Onnasch« – he put on long-term loan to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. When the wave of the so-called »Wild Painting« swept through the art scene in the 1980s, it was hardly surprising that the works of Bernd Koberling also underwent a reappraisal. His participation in the 1981 exhibition »A New Spirit in Painting,« Staged in London‘s Royal Academy by Christos Joachimides, Norman Rosenthal, and Nicholas Serota, marked the beginning of a series of comprehensive exhibitions in which Koberling was presented to international audiences: in 1982, »Berlin – la rage de peindre« at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, »New Painting in Germany« at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, »New Figuration – Contemporary Art from Germany« at the Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery Los Angeles, »Zeitgeist« at the Martin-Gropius-Baun Berlin, in 1983, »La Métropole retrouvée« at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, in 1984, »Origen y Visión« at the Centre Cultural de la Caixa de Pensions Barcelona and »An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture« at the Museum of Modern Art New York.
In the highly acclaimed book »Hunger nach Bildern« by Wolfgang Max Faust and Gerd de Vries, Koberling was hailed, together with K. H. Hödicke, as the father figure of the Berlin-based protagonists of »Wild Painting«, including Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salomé, and Bernd Zimmer. The attention commanded by his singular oeuvre increased rapidly in the first half of the 1980s, but defied such classifications as »New Wild Ones« or »Neo-Expressionism.« The intensive critical discourse accompanying these movements – attacks by Benjamin Buchloh and the circle around the conceptual journal »October«, critics such as Douglas Crimp and defenders such as Siegfried Gohr or the American art historian Donald Kuspit – largely disregarded Koberling’s work.
From 1976 onwards, Bernd Koberling already held posts as visiting lecturer at academies in Hamburg, Düsseldorf, and Berlin; and from 1981 to 1988, he taught as professor at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg and, from 1988 until his retirement, at the Berlin University of the Arts. »For him, the inner necessity, whatever it may spawn, was the driving force […], not false epigonism. This need, which he still uncompromisingly heeds to this day, is something to which he introduced his students and for which they admire him«, wrote the art historian Eugen Blume in the context of a group exhibition held in honour of Koberling at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, which featured both his own works and those of ten of his students. (10) This characterisation accurately encapsulates Bernd Koberling‘s artistic approach and continues to shape the extraordinary quality of his oeuvre. Up to the present day, he continues to work on his extended trips into the high north, into the pris-tine natural environment. Refreshingly free of quotidian issues and supposedly topical discourse, this artist‘s body of work is characterised by great profundity, humility, and strength.
1 Cf. Jan Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, Verlag C. H. Beck, Munich 2000.
2 Cf. Johannes Gachnang, »From Continent to Continent«, in: Europa/Amerika. Die Geschichte einer künstlerischen Faszination seit 1940, exhibition catalogue Museum Ludwig, Cologne 1986, pp. 337-342; 337: »Baselitz saw it in Berlin, Nitsch in Vienna, I myself in Basel, and Kounellis will not have missed it in Rome …..«
3 Typical is here the opulently illustrated volume by Georg Poensgen and Leopold Zahn, Abstraktion. Eine Weltsprache, Woldemar Klein Verlag, Baden-Baden 1958. The »documenta II« in the summer of 1959 followed this injunction very clearly and placed the stylistic direction of the Informel movement and Abstract Expressionism in the foreground.
4 Bernd Koberling was still very conscious of the impression left by this painting in a conversation on September 22, 2017 – almost sixty years after the exhibition.
5 Ibid.
6 Bernd Koberling. Malerei 1962-1977, exhibition catalogue Haus am Waldsee, Berlin and Städtisches Museum Schloss Morsbroich Leverkusen, Berlin 1978, p. 7.
7 Ibid., p. 16.
8 Ibid., p. 17.
9 René Block, »Not a Monument, but rather Food for Thought,« in: Images of Germany. Art from a Divided Land, exhibition catalogue. Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, DuMont, Cologne 1997, pp. 246-249.
10 Vitales Echo, exhibition catalogue Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2016, p. 13.
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