Johannes Grützke: The Painter of the Human

Johannes Grützke: The Painter of the Human is the first comprehensive exhibition in the German Rhine–Main region dedicated to the Berlin artist Johannes Grützke (1937–2017). Featuring over fifty works, including several large-scale pieces, the show provides a wide-ranging view of one of the most idiosyncratic representatives of figurative painting in postwar German art.

Grützke’s powerful visual language, marked by intellectual precision and subversive humor, consistently focuses on the human being. His works do not present idealized renderings, but rather tragicomic, complex, and profoundly social individuals. For over five decades, he created an unmistakable oeuvre that, with a penetrating gaze, dissects societal roles, masquerades, and absurdities. In portraits of individuals, group paintings, and scenic compositions, a narrative panorama of human behavior unfolds.

The exhibition is divided into four thematic realms that illuminate central aspects of Johannes Grützke’s work. The focus lies on the human being in his corporeal and physical presence, as an image of the self and the stranger, as a character on the stage of life. Humor and irony serve as means of distance and reflection, while works of social critique question power relations, conventions, and ideological systems. Another focus is Grützke’s engagement with the iconological traditions of myth, religion, and history. These works are characterized by intentional irony and a critical gesture through which he brings archetypal scenes into the present and questions traditional narratives.

The show brings together works from public and private collections. Numerous rarely exhibited loans open new perspectives on the work of Johannes Grützke. An accompanying hall of mirrors in the exhibition space invites visitors to encounter themselves in dialogue with Grützke’s art—both as beholders and at the same time as part of the exhibition. The exhibition is conceived as an invitation to engage with the image of the human in art and with our own role in the world.

“The proximity to the Christian Schad Museum allows for an interesting dialogue between two generations of artists,” says curator Johannes Honeck, director of Kunsthalle Jesuitenkirche and the Christian Schad Museum. “While Schad portrays the individual with analytic precision in the style of New Objectivity, Grützke relies on expressive exaggeration. Despite all their differences, they share an uncompromising interest in the human figure.”