RAVENSBURG.- For the first time, the exhibition Kathrin Sonntag and Gabriele Münter. The Travelling Eye presents photographs by two Berlin-born artists engaging in a dialogue that spans a time difference of more than a century. Kathrin Sonntag (b. 1981) has embarked on a journey through the hitherto little-known photographic oeuvre of one of the most important artists of German Expressionism, in order to respond with images from her own photographic archive to selected photographs by Gabriele Münter (1877–1962).

Gabriele Münter captured the featured photographs in 1899/1900 during her two-year journey through the United States. The outstanding compositional quality of these images already demonstrates Münter's search for artistic expression, prior to her painterly work. Kathrin Sonntag became known for installations that place her own and found photographic material into a spatial dialogue. By juxtaposing her work with Münter’s photographs, Sonntag creates a space of resonance within the present, playfully highlights correspondences, and stimulates the pleasure of discovery. These echoing and reverberating spaces draw attention to the question of how Münter and Sonntag–and ultimately we ourselves–encounter the world through the medium of photography, both then and now.

With kind thanks to the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation. The exhibition was realized in cooperation with Museum Marta Herford. The jointly published artist’s book has been released by Spector Books.

Gabriele Münter: Awakening in Form and Color

The monographic exhibition is devoted to Gabriele Münter (1877–1962), one of the most important figures in German Expressionism and a key voice of the early 20th-century European avant-garde. Drawing from the Selinka Collection of the Kunstmuseum, the exhibition centers on the period between 1908 and 1914, which was among the most productive of her career. During these years, Murnau in the Bavarian Alpine foothills became Münter’s preferred place of painting, where her ability to simplify forms, her clear color contrasts, and strikingly precise painterly style came fully into their own.

In addition to her “Expressionist period” before the First World War—when she played a decisive role in the activities of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists Association Munich) and, from 1911, in the aesthetic, intellectual, and emancipatory project of the Blauer Reiter (Blue Rider)—the exhibition also traces other life stages and phases of development. Münter’s oeuvre is not characterized by a continuous evolution, but rather by the coexistence of different styles, techniques, and recurring motifs. Compromising some 50 works, the exhibition Gabriele Münter. Awakening in Form and Color highlights the stylistic diversity and innovative power of Gabriele Münter, offering a multifaceted insight into a groundbreaking oeuvre of Classical Modernism.

In recent years, Gabriele Münter’s work has increasingly received international attention, most recently in solo exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and this year at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Awakening in Form and Color at Kunstmuseum Ravensburg marks the first solo exhibition in Baden-Württemberg in two decades. The show is additionally supported by the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung.