NEWHARDENBERG.- Despite all of the quacking going on about demographic decline: the ducks – all those Daisys and Donalds – are mulptiplying and Duckburg, at least, has grown considerably.

Following the Neuhardenberg exhibition in 2003, they travelled the world, were celebrated wherever they went and have now returned to their place of departure to show and astound their many new colleagues at Neuhardenberg with the many sensational things they found along the way. Did you know, for example, that Carl Spitzweg’s The Sunday Stroll, Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog or Antoine Wateau’s Gilles also have ducklike originals? Visitors are invited to view around one hundred and twenty works of art, among these seventy new discoveries, that set the history of European art in a completely new light.

This idiosyncratic and the only true collection of artworks has been collected, maintained and cultivated by the interDuck group of artists who, at the same time, have dedicated themselves to researching the history of art from the duck perspective. In the course of this work, they arrived at a sensational insight: ducks have been living among us since the beginning of time itself - in all epochs, on all continents and in nearly all known forms of artistic expression.

Most of the works on exhibition are original format unique paintings in oil or acrylic. Comic aspects aside, the works also have a serious undertone: with a sense of irony and a distinct smirk on their faces, they comment on the loss of history, knowledge and cultural memory and make their own contribution against the raging thoughtlessness which reigns in the chaos of our post-post-modern world.

The multilingual publication Art of the DUCKOMENTA (Cologne: Ehapa Comic Collection, 400 pages, coloured illustrations throughout, € 49.95, ISBN 978-3-7704-3293-6) is being brought out for the exhibition and can be purchased at book stores and at the Stiftung Schloss Neuhardenberg shop.