K20
Etel Adnan
April 1, 2023—July 16, 2023
Chaïm Soutine
September 2, 2023–April 14, 2024
K21
JENNY HOLZER
March, 11—August 6, 2023
Isaac Julien
September 16, 2023–February, 2024
Andrea Büttner
October 21, 2023–February, 2024
Etel Adnan: April 1, 2023—July 16, 2023
Press conference: Thursday, March 30, 2023, 11am at K20
The Lenbachhaus in Munich and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf are jointly organizing the first comprehensive monographic exhibition of the work of Etel Adnan in Germany. Born in Beirut, Etel Adnan (1925–2021) is an important representative of modern-ism. Her artistic and literary work is characterized by a great and lived exchange between the Arab and Western worlds. The work of the poet, journalist, painter, and philosopher, who spent her life between Leba-non, France, and California, combines very different art forms, media, languages, and cul-tures. After the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), Adnan refused to continue work-ing in French and showed solidarity with Algeria: “I didn’t need to write in French anymore, I was going to paint in Arabic.” Her political clarity, as well as the close connection between writing and painting, became an essential feature of her oeuvre.
An exhibition cooperation of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau München and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, curated by Sébastien Delot, Direk-tor LaM, Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne.
The exhibition is sponsored by the Rudolf August Oetker Foundation.
Chaïm Soutine: September 2, 2023–April 14, 2024
Press conference: Thursday, August 31, 2023, 11am at K20
The Kunstsammlung is dedicating an exhibition to the magnificent work of Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943). His paintings are explosions of color, beautiful and drastic at the same time. He painted pageboys, cooks, altar boys: people who, like him, find themselves on the lowest rung of society. With these, as with the paintings of wavering landscapes and slaughtered animals, he captured the torn attitude to life of an entire epoch.
Soutine grew up in Belarus. In 1913, he moved to Paris. Although the metropolis became his adopted home, Soutine remained an outsider throughout his life, poorly mastering the French language and remaining a stranger to social manners. The overriding theme of the exhibition is emigration and the permanent uprooting of the individual as a consequence of this. This individual as well as social phenomenon spans an arc to the present time, in which rootless-ness has become an integral part of the modern attitude to life in the twenty-first century. Soutine, who had an enormous influence on painting after 1945, is one of the central repre-sentatives of classical modernism; in Germany, he is revered in artistic circles.
JENNY HOLZER: March, 11—August 6, 2023
Press conference: Thursday, March 9, 2023, 11am at K21
Starting March 11, 2023, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen will present a sweeping exhibition of the internationally celebrated American artist Jenny Holzer (b. 1950). Since the 1970s, Holzer has been renowned for her thought-provoking use of text in various media and her pioneering adaptation of new technologies. Holzer’s Düsseldorf exhibition, spanning K21’s Bel Étage and temporary exhibition galleries, will range from posters to paintings and stoneworks, touching on subjects such as war, absurdity, and populism. In keeping with Holzer’s deeply democratic approach and artistic practice, her works challenge viewers to grapple with conflicting perspectives and find their own empathic, open-minded positions in complex debates. This makes the exhibition a public forum for discussions of current global challenges.
Ströer ist Partner of the exhibition of Jenny Holzer.
Isaac Julien: September 16, 2023–February, 2024
Press conference: Thursday, September 14, 2023, 11am at K21
The first survey exhibition in Germany dedicated to work of the British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien (b. 1960 in London) reveals the breadth of a groundbreaking oeuvre from its emergence in the 1980s to the present. Julien’s critical thinking, aimed above all at an in-tense engagement with the culture and history of colonialism, is expressed in his early films, as well as in the highly aesthetic film images of the major, internationally acclaimed video installations of the last twenty years.
The exhibition is being developed in cooperation with Tate Britain, London, where it will be on view from April 27 to August 20, 2023.
Andrea Büttner: October 21, 2023–February 2024
Press conference: October 19, 2023, 11am at K21
In her artistic practice, Andrea Büttner (b. 1972 in Stuttgart) combines art history with social and ethical issues. Her research-based works focus on wide-ranging themes such as pov-erty, shame, work, craft, religion, ascription of value, vulnerability, community, botany, phi-losophy, and art, which she examines in terms of their ambivalent tension between aesthet-ics and ethics. The internationally renowned artist uses various conceptual methods, materi-als, and media—from woodcut, painting, drawing, printing, and photography to installation, video, sculpture, glass art, and ceramics—to pose fundamental questions about the relationship between intimate artistic production and public exposure, between mechanisms of rep-resentation and ascriptions of value in art and society.
With the exhibition at K21, Andrea Büttner aims to bring together the various strands of her current research and work. Thematically, she focuses on the structural connection of shame, labor, power and the question of value creation processes and valuation systems, art histori-cal images of so-called shame punishments and their contemporary relevance, arts and crafts as a political field and its ambivalent role for national and religious identity formation, and fascist continuities in the ecology movement.
The exhibitions in the Bel Étage of K21 are supported by the Stiftung Kunst, Kultur und Soziales der Sparda Bank West.
Stay connected: Please check our website for regular updates on our program. For further information please contact: presse@kunstsammlung.de
