There’s a lot going on in the current exhibition “Reflector” in the Neue Sächsische Galerie in Chemnitz! An art chaos – which, at second glance, has a lot to do with each of us.
Let’s start with the first look at this exhibition: Wooden objects are lying on the floor, they are shapes for which one does not easily find the right words. In another corner are wooden towers. Pictures and graphics on the walls, vessels, people, sometimes just lines. There are also plinths, showcases and boxes, some of which are filled with petrified wood that is millions of years old. A meteorite is found, stuffed Argus pheasants, bones. It’s like in a dream: a distant being has picked up random things from the earth, stuffed them into a toy box and now dumped it over the Neue Sächsische Galerie (NSG) in Chemnitz Tietz. This is – at first glance – “Reflector”, the exhibition that opened on Tuesday evening.
Cooperation between East and West
In order to take a second look at this chaos, we need some information. So: This exhibition is a cooperation between the NSG and the Kunstverein Trier. The people of Chemnitz and Trier know each other, because the NSG from the city with the Marx head was a guest in the Marx anniversary year 2018 with exhibitions in the Marx birth city of Trier. They stayed in touch, that is, East and West. This is obviously necessary, because more than 30 years after reunification, art and culture have not yet grown together as one might have wished, says Mathias Lindner, director of the NSG.
So how could Trier and Chemnitz learn from each other? The idea: Eight artists from the Kunstverein Trier and eight colleagues selected by them, who also come from other cities in the republic, were able to look through the NSG collection – and thus East German art from the GDR, the gallery’s main focus. And because the Natural History Museum is located next to the NSG in Tietz, the cooperation was expanded and the holdings could also be viewed there.
Who is Claus?
And so the people from Trier and their colleagues selected works or exhibits in the NSG and in the Natural History Museum for the current exhibition that they could connect to: by juxtaposing them with their own existing works or by creating new images as a kind of answer or a Place your own work as a sign of respect, explains Sebastian Böhm from the Trierer Kunstverein. As with Katharina Worring from Trier.
According to Böhm, she had connections in the GDR, valued the artist Carlfriedrich Claus from Annaberg-Buchholz and has now selected some of his graphics from the NSG inventory: etchings from 1986, on which his filigree signs and lines are partly in black pull tangles together. On the wall next door there is now a larger-than-life picture painted in oil by Worring between 2019 and 2021. Her work is also abstract – a landscape of strokes, streaked with colour, interspersed with black centres. And so Claus gets back into the conversation. At the opening of the exhibition, a guest, presumably from Trier, asked another: “Who is Claus? Is he still alive?” No, he died in 1998. Kurt Teubner, on the other hand, was born in Aue in 1903 and died there in 1990. His relief-like collage from 1979 from the NSG inventory is on display: “Before winter comes”. Wooden boards, roofing felt, a few leaves. Next to it is the picture “Containerbox” from this year by Thoralf Knobloch, who lives in Berlin and is one of the artists invited by the people of Trier. Although the box is overflowing, the picture radiates perfection, almost sterility, and so the two pictures, with a time difference of more than 40 years, tell of the view of everyday things, but also of changes, today’s striving for appearances and the loss of poetry that was in Teubner’s work still shines. The preserved pheasants from the Natural History Museum, on the other hand, have a shelf with objects that mainly represent plates and bowls filled with bones – Stefan Philipps from the Trier Association called his work “spare parts store”. Other filigree works on paper or large color compositions of today reflect the surfaces of wood and stones that are millions of years old.
Without barriers
Böhm emphasizes that visitors are free to explore what is related to one another here and how. And then comes the third glance: If you remove the barriers in your head, the very different works allow wild associations, your imagination can let off steam while you look at them, and the joy of the colours, shapes and creativity of the artists can spread. That clears your head. Especially since the integrated natural history, according to Lindner, spans the arc to the origin. We see forms and colors of nature millions of years old that point to where the roots of our art lie – which is also a part of human history and therefore a part of each of us.
The “Reflector” exhibition in the NSG in Tietz in Chemnitz can be seen until February 26: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesdays until 7 p.m., closed on Wednesdays. » nsg-chemnitz.de