MUNICH.- In ‘Uproar in Augsburg’ two generations of German artists from the postwar period come face to face, each represented by major works from the collections of the Pinakothek der Moderne. What unites them is a leaning towards a kind of figurative painting that does not shy away from personal and political comment, placing it in opposition to the approaches of conceptual art and minimal art.

This explicit interest in the medium of painting while critically questioning content and style was first evident in the generation of artists born before the end of the war: Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz, and A. R. Penck. The way these artists radically changed and redefined painting had an impact on the following generation, loosely defined as the ‘Neue Wilde’ (meaning: ‘new wilds’), including Walter Dahn, Rainer Fetting, Markus Oehlen, and Salomé, who adopted an even more intense and colourful pictorial language than their predecessors.

In the postwar years, German artists sought a renewal in art, not just in painting, but also in action art, object art, environments, performance art, and other new media. Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) embodies this hunger for renewal. By fragmenting and inverting his subjects, he liberated his canvases of the traditional mechanisms of perception, as shown in his 1978 work ‘The Eagle’, in which the symbol of the German nation and Reich is turned on its head.

The paintings and sculptures of Markus Lüpertz (b. 1941 Reichenberg, now Liberec, Czech Republic) are characterized by an archaic monumentality in which the figurative and the abstract are melded into a distinctive language of forms. Jörg Immendorff (b. 1945; d. 2007), by contrast, adopted an approach that was both narrative and critical. His work, ‘Café Deutschland VII’ (1980) takes as its subject the history of the two German states after World War II, the division between East and West that was also reflected in the artistic dialogue maintained between himself and his East German friend and fellow artist A. R. Penck. While Immendorff developed a narrative style, Penck’s art confronted the viewer with a world populated by unique, mysterious, and seemingly archaic signs.

Around the time of the ‘Café Deutschland’ series, a new generation of painters born in the 1950s started forming loose affiliations in Berlin, Cologne, and Hamburg. For all their stylistic variety, what they all shared was a spontaneous, often subjective vernacular. In 1977 a group of art students in Berlin, among them Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, and Salomé set up a ‘non-profit gallery’ at Moritzplatz in Kreuzberg. In their paintings they gave expression to personal experiences of life in the divided city, rendered in dynamic brushstrokes. Salomé (b. 1945) is represented in the show with a captivating canvas, ‘Sumo Attack’ from 1982, depicting two fighters. The fluidity of the strokes and representation of the motionless bodies, poised to attack becomes emblematic of oppositional forces, in both a painterly and political sense.

The works that originate from Cologne often reveal a proclivity for codified content through use of symbols. This is evidenced, for instance, in Walter Dahn’s painting ‘The Mülheimer Freiheit (Newspaper Reader)’ from 1981. In it we see a man, head obscured by the blank pages of a newspaper, while beside him a column of six balanced heads goes unnoticed. Like the reader in the picture, the viewer gazes at the empty space of the newspaper which has yet to be filled.

A completely different style emerged among the group of ‘wild’ painters in Hamburg. While Kippenberger made shrewdly ironic references to the history of art (from Picasso to Pop Art), as well as burning social issues of his day, Albert Oehlen’s style made deciphering recognizably figurative forms virtually impossible while at the same time subtly inciting the viewer to attempt it. His work casts several historical movements in art in a new light, ranging from Cubism to the colour field painting of the Abstract
Expressionists.

The diversity of artistic styles and artistic achievements is typified by the works on show from the Pinakothek der Moderne’s collections. The works bear witness to a state of German painting in perpetual flux, marked by shared affinities – and clashes. This exhibition in Augsburg’s Glaspalast traces these turbulent years in painting – and together they cause an ‘Uproar in Augsburg’.

The exhibition features some 40 art works from the holdings of the Pinakothek der Moderne, including artworks on long-term loan from the Michael and Eleanore Stoffel Foundation and Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds.