Beautiful Anarchy. Johan Thorn Prikker and His Time / Emma Talbot: Psyche

With the parallel exhibitions on Johan Thorn Prikker and Emma Talbot, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld bridge the visionary concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk at the beginning of the twentieth century with a contemporary, multilayered reflection on humanity, society, and the planetary future.

He was a rebel and an aesthete—an anarchist who aspired to “paint with the sun itself”: the Dutch-German artist Johan Thorn Prikker (1868–1932) ranks among the defining protagonists of the 1910s and 1920s, who sought to unite painting with the applied arts and architecture into a Gesamtkunstwerk. He is best known as a pioneering force in the renewal of stained glass in the modern era.

The Kunstmuseen Krefeld not only hold the monumental mural cycle Ages of Life (The Life), which Thorn Prikker created in 1923 for the Marble Hall of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum (KWM), but also the largest collection of his artistic estate, comprising around one thousand works.

“Johan Thorn Prikker’s estate is one of our greatest treasures,” says museum director Katia Baudin. “With his universal approach—aimed at bringing together fine art, applied art, and craftsmanship—Thorn Prikker was an early contributor to the innovative reform program of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum. It is precisely this interdisciplinary understanding of art that makes rediscovering his work so valuable for the Kunstmuseen Krefeld’s current program.”

Trained as a painter, Prikker turned to the applied arts around 1896. He found like-minded figures among artists such as Henry van de Velde, who sought to redefine the role of art in society through radical ideas influenced by anarchist thought. His pursuit of a “communal art” attracted the attention of Friedrich Deneken, director of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, who brought the Dutch artist to Krefeld in 1904.

For the KWM, Thorn Prikker designed posters, organized exhibitions, and created designs for textiles, tapestries, and ornamental wall decorations. As a teacher at the newly established Krefeld School of Arts and Crafts, he taught, among others, Heinrich Campendonk and Helmuth Macke, and later held teaching positions in Düsseldorf, Essen, Munich, and Cologne. He gained widespread recognition through his move toward monumental, architecture-related art, whose powerful impact on viewers is already evident in his full-scale designs.

Featuring around 150 works, the exhibition presents Thorn Prikker’s oeuvre for the first time after 60 years and situates it within the context of the Krefeld collection. Highlights of the exhibition include large-scale designs for stained glass and mosaics created for the landmark Düsseldorf exhibition GeSoLei in 1926.

In parallel,  British artist Emma Talbot (*1969, Stourbridge; lives and works in London and Reggio Emilia) presents with Psyche a new site-specific installation at the KWM. The exhibition is part of the tenth edition of the Collection Satellites series, which since 2018 has brought contemporary artistic positions into dialogue with the collection and architecture of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld. Talbot has created an ensemble of new works that engage with Johan Thorn Prikker’s mural Ages of Life (The Life) (1923), radically rethinking its vision of a cyclical life process.

Internationally acclaimed for her large-scale, visually striking installations made of painted silk, Talbot combines painting, sculpture, drawing, and animation into complex spatial environments. Her visual language merges figuration, ornament, and text, unfolding narrative structures in which individual experience intersects with pressing contemporary issues. While Thorn Prikker’s Ages of Life is shaped by rhythm, the seasons, and continuity, Talbot proposes a counter-image: a world defined by simultaneity, marked by climate crisis, geopolitical tensions, and the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence. Rather than obscuring Thorn Prikker’s murals, it enters into dialogue with them. Openings in the fabric and loosely suspended panels create sightlines and overlaps—a visual interplay of foreground and background that disrupts the clear order of the historical paintings.

“With Emma Talbot, we are presenting an internationally recognized artist whose work translates key questions of our time into a distinctive and powerful visual language,” says director Katia Baudin. “Her dialogue with Johan Thorn Prikker—an important figure for both our collection and the museum’s history—exemplifies our programmatic approach: to rethink the collection through contemporary perspectives, in this case by juxtaposing two universal artistic visions.”

The painted silk reveals a dense, color-intensive imagery: scenes of birth, labor, care, and loss interweave with plants, animals, extreme weather events, and technological structures. The cosmos also plays a role, with motifs of planets, asteroids, and speculative forms of human production in space. The result is a network in which the human, the non-human, and the technological are inseparably intertwined. Textile and sculptural elements further expand the installation. At the same time, the work offers a broader perspective. Despite addressing uncertainty and crisis, Psyche is guided by a clear stance: within chaos lies potential.