Werner Tübke: Metamorphoses

In 2023, the Städel Museum received an impressive and representative selection of works by Werner Tübke from the collection of Barbara and Eduard Beaucamp. Tübke is one of the most important painters of the German Democratic Republic. The Städel is presenting the outstanding donation of forty-six drawings and watercolours by Tübke in an exhibition dedicated to his graphic work and metaphorical visual language.

Philipp Demandt, Director of the Städel Museum: “Werner Tübke is a solitary figure in post-war German art. His works challenge us to recognize the human in the abysmal, the timeless in the historical and the true in the alienated. It is thanks to Eduard Beaucamp’s decades of tireless commitment that we are able to show his drawings in such depth today. As an art critic, friend and collector, he recognized Tübke’s stature early on and communicated it passionately to the public. The generous donation by Barbara and Eduard Beaucamp represents far more than a significant addition to the Städel Museum’s collection; it sheds new light on Tübke’s work and cements its place in art-historical consciousness.”

Tübke (1929–2004) ranks alongside Bernhard Heisig and Wolfgang Mattheuer as one of the leading representatives of the so-called First Leipzig School and created a body of work in painting and drawing that is autonomous and consistent, dense in both form and content. “Drawing is an elementary need”, the artist once said, “everything else comes afterwards.” Tübke’s watercolours and drawings in graphite, pen and chalk testify to his great creative freedom and independence. They are an essential part of his artistic oeuvre: he used them to collect ideas, explore formal considerations and develop a wide variety of themes.

“The seemingly realistic nature of Tübke’s work is deceptive, because his art is far from representational or unambiguous. There are always ‘tipping points’, ambiguities and multiple meanings. He was interested in fundamental human themes, which he approached directly through his paintings and drawings. He virtually circled them with each new work. Beaucamp aptly described this artistic approach as ‘thinking in images’. Consequently, Tübke rarely produced classical preliminary sketches for his paintings. Rather, painting, drawing and printmaking were all equal parts of an ongoing process of reflection. The end result is not one pictorial solution, but many—spanning various media and decades. Tübke’s art proves to be constantly changing and as metamorphic as his visual language”, says Dr Regina Freyberger, Head of Prints and Drawings after 1800 at the Städel Museum and curator of the exhibition.

In his multi-layered compositions, characterized by an imaginative, sometimes almost exuberant fantasy, Werner Tübke reflects on the complexity of the world, with all its existential questions, hardships, and conflicts. In doing so, he demonstrates a keen awareness of human vulnerability, placing the individual at the centre of his art. Angels, unicorns and magicians, harlequins, veiled and bound figures, and repeatedly tortured and masked characters populate his works. In his “world theatre”, time is suspended through the creative appropriation of older art history, and everything is permeated by memories. While his art is characterized by a realistic formal language, the pictorial statements often remain ambiguous. Tübke was less concerned with a concrete reproduction of reality than with “interpreting existence”.

Director: Dr Philipp Demandt
Curator: Regina Freyberger (Head of Prints and Drawings after 1800 at the Städel Museum)

Press contact: Pamela Rohde (Head of Press and Online Communication): presse@staedelmuseum.de / T (+49 69) 605098 170

Press material: newsroom.staedelmuseum.de/en (texts and images for download)