The Art of Seeing

Seeing the Old Masters with fresh eyes.

This special exhibition brings together around 90 international photographic works with selected masterpieces from the Gemäldegalerie, one of the world’s most significant collections of pre-modern painting.

Works by artists such as Thomas Struth, Cindy Sherman, Martin Parr, Jeff Wall, Candida Höfer and Carrie Mae Weems engage with the Old Masters as a tribute, a reinterpretation or a reflection, opening up surprising perspectives on familiar works.

Across six thematic sections, the exhibition explores different ways in which contemporary artists engage with historical images and interpret them.

The focus is on questions of appropriation, staging and transformation, as well as on materiality, perception and the circulation of digital images.

Appropriation, reflection, retelling

For many of the photographers featured, the works of the Old Masters are far more than just an art-historical legacy. They serve as a source of inspiration for new artistic creations, commentaries on social issues and formal-aesthetic experiments.

Jeff Wall, for instance, transforms the contemplative stillness of a painting by Chardin into a contemporary artist’s portrait. Cindy Sherman, Catherine Opie and Maud Sulter draw on historical portrait traditions to explore issues of gender, identity and cultural belonging. Tom Hunter transposes pictorial compositions from pre-modern painting to Berlin-Friedrichshain, bringing the consequences of gentrification into sharp relief.

Other artists focus their attention on the material qualities of the works: Ola Kolehmainen, for example, enlarges the craquelure in a portrait of a woman by Petrus Christus to monumental proportions, thereby making the traces of time and ageing a visual motif.

Another key focus is on the museum as a place in itself. Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth present museums as spaces of contemplation and staging, whilst Louise Lawler questions the mechanisms of institutional meaning-making. Carrie Mae Weems, on the other hand, addresses the issues of access, representation and exclusion in her series ‘Museums’, highlighting whose perspectives and stories are present in the museum and which are marginalised.

Bettina von Zwehl and Miguel Calderón, in turn, draw attention to those people who work amongst the masterpieces every day yet remain largely invisible.

The Museum in the Digital Age

At the same time, the exhibition explores the changing conditions of viewing in the digital age. Visitors themselves become part of the museum’s presentation through their smartphones, whilst social media plays a part in determining which artworks gain visibility. Collections of pre-modern painting are today not only sites of art history, but also visual spaces of the present.

‘The Art of Seeing’ brings together loans from major international museums, galleries and private collections.

Educational programme

A comprehensive programme of educational activities for all age groups invites visitors to rediscover their own perspective on the Old Masters.

Exhibition catalogue

A richly illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Curatorial Team

The exhibition is curated by Katja Kleinert, curator of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting, and Erik Eising, research assistant at the Gemäldegalerie.

• A special exhibition by the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin