Top Event
Encounters of the 19th century with works of the 20th and 21st centuries from the collection of the National Gallery
The exhibition brings together artworks from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries from the collections of the National Gallery.
Image gallery
Gotthard Graubner (1930 - 2013), Tojama II (Farbraumkörper)
Bernhard Heisig (1925 - 2011): Beharrlichkeit des Vergessens
Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), Die Familie Claude Terrasse im Garten
Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721 - 1782), Selbstbildnis
Arthur Kampf (1864 - 1950), Artist
Renée Sintenis (1888 - 1965), Selbstbildnis
In 1876, the National Gallery opened as a home for contemporary art. Today, under the name Alte Nationalgalerie, it is the starting point of the National Gallery and the museum for art from the long 19th century. All six buildings of the National Gallery are united by a common collection, from the Alte Nationalgalerie to the Neue Nationalgalerie to the Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart – Hamburger Bahnhof.
In its anniversary year, the Alte Nationalgalerie offers selective encounters between works from the 20th and 21st centuries and 19th-century art on all three floors, inviting visitors to engage in associative viewing.
Dialogues across eras and genres
Still lifes, self-portraits and portraits come together, as do abstraction and figurative art, painting, photography and sculpture. This gives rise to surprising combinations:
Gotthard Graubner’s (1930–2013) intense colour-space forms encounter new forms of perception found in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) ‘Diamond Dust Shoes’, in turn, enters into a dialogue with a still life by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). This juxtaposition illustrates how, over more than a century, the genre has developed as a field of experimentation for the interplay of form, colour and surface.
Across the ages, self-portraits and societal role models can also be placed in relation to one another. Thus, the self-portrait of the painter Sabine Lepsius (1864–1942), who had to assert herself in a male-dominated art world, is juxtaposed with a photographic self-portrait by the British contemporary artist Sarah Lucas (*1962). Smoking and striking a casual, masculine-sounding pose, Lucas gazes defiantly past the camera.
Another juxtaposition brings together Adolph Menzel’s epoch-making ‘Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclops)’ (1872–1875) with Andreas Gursky’s (*1955) ‘Singapore Bourse II’ (1997). Here, realist painting meets a condensed artistic representation of the reality of the stock exchange. Despite their different forms of representation, both works focus on working environments and economic processes, as well as on the possibilities of depicting these artistically.
