IN DIALOGUE

DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam is showing the exhibition IN DIALOGUE—Hasso Plattner Collection: Art from the GDR in spring 2025. The second presentation of the collection focuses on dialogue as a means of engaging with art from the former GDR. 

IN DIALOGUE shows approximately 50 works from the collection by artists like Gudrun Brüne, Hartwig Ebersbach, Ulrich Hachulla, Rolf Händler, Bernhard Heisig, Johannes Heisig, Peter Herrmann, Ralf Kerbach, Walter Libuda, Peter Makolies,  Wolfgang Mattheuer, Harald Metzkes, Stefan Plenkers, Núria Quevedo, Gerhard Richter, Arno Rink, Cornelia Schleime, Willi Sitte, Gabriele Stötzer, Erika Stürmer-Alex, Werner Tübke, and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, predominantly from the period between 1966 and 1992. 

The two chapters of the exhibition highlight the artists’ different perspectives, along with the contexts in which the works were created. The impetus came from Arno Rink’s painting Portrait Henry Schumann (1968) (Portrait of Henry Schumann), which depicts the art historian and critic in Rink’s studio, as well as Schumann’s book Ateliergespräche (Studio Conversations). In this publication, released in 1976 by the Leipzig press VEB E. A. Seemann, 20 artists exchange their views with him. Well-known personalities such as Bernhard Heisig and Werner Tübke appear alongside artists with unconventional training and career paths such as Peter Herrmann. This unusual mixture of artists and the focus on their individual voices signaled a relaxation of cultural policy at the time, yet this was marred in the same year (1976) by a series of cultural-political and social events like the expatriation of the poet and song writer Wolf Biermann.

In the first exhibition space, the artworks and the artists’ conversations with Schumann will be placed into a historical context. On the upper floor of MINSK, individual works come into dialogue with one another. These constellations open up a perspective onto broader questions about the history of art and cultural policy in the GDR after the year 1976. The selection is complemented by other works from the collection that illustrate the dynamic between expression and withdrawal, between speaking out and silence. 

IN DIALOGUE also provides occasion for a new series of studio conversations conducted by curator Daniel Milnes with artists from the collection, which will be released as a podcast series to accompany the exhibition. In this context, works from the collection will be examined from the artists’ perspective as well as how art created in the GDR is seen and shown today.

The patron Hasso Plattner collects painting with a focus, among other things, on art from the former GDR. His collection was shown for the first time at Haus der Brandenburgisch-Preußischen Geschichte in Potsdam in 2012. After individual  paintings were shown in the group exhibition Behind the Mask 2017–18 at the Museum Barberini, DAS MINSK will now host parts of this collection for the second time within East German modernist architecture that was completed in 1977 to house the former terrace restaurant “Minsk.”