Tear down that wall!
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Previews begin today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for “Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures,” the most anticipated contemporary art exhibition of the new year. (It opens to the public Sunday, and I’ll have a review next week.) Surveying East and West German art from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the exhibition covers a lot of ground.
I saw the show Thursday, and there are lots of surprises. Does the work of Hermann Glockner, Eugen Schonebeck or the Dresden Autoperforation Group ring a bell? Long after you see the show, I expect they will resonate.
Germany has, of course, become an international cultural powerhouse over the last quarter of a century. Among the numerous familiar artists is Thomas Schutte, 54. That’s his 1977 “Large Wall” above, made while he was still a student of Gerhard Richter at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. I had not seen it in the flesh before, but ...
...in several ways it’s emblematic of the exhibition’s richness.
The installation is composed of 1,050 “bricks,” each made to scale on small pieces of wood that are slathered with brushy oil paint in reds, yellows and umber. Together they form a painted picture of a wall, assembled in front of an actual wall. The gestural application of paint in hot colors recalls Expressionist paint-handling, a motif that has been the standard assumption for German art since early in the 20th century.
Rather than figurative, however, this brushy paint is abstract. It conforms to expectations in much of the postwar avant-garde — especially in the United States — about the most important kind of Modern painting possible. Tensions among social and cultural norms arise.
In this savvy work Schutte is painting many different types of walls—barriers to freedom — while obviously evoking the one made from real bricks and mortar that, in those days, split the city of Berlin in two. What makes the installation sing, however, is the way its bricks are put together.
Each one rests on two small pins, pushed into the actual, thoroughly ordinary wall behind it, so that the tops of the small panels lean back in repose. Like something from a fairy tale, a strong gust of wind (or, this being Southern California, perhaps a temblor) could knock the imposing barrier down.
As an image of obstruction and inevitable emancipation, the “Large Wall” suddenly gets cut down to size.
--Christopher Knight
