During the guided tours you will gain exciting insights and have the opportunity to ask questions about the works on display. The tours last approximately one hour and no prior registration is necessary.
Image gallery
Ausstellungsansicht „SchlagLicht", Stiftung Kunstforum Berliner Volksbank
SchlagLicht, the second exhibition that will be shown at the Kunstforum Berliner Volksbank Foundation in 2023, opens as part of Berlin Art Week and was created in collaboration with the DZ BANK art foundation.
Paintings, sculptures and graphics from the Berliner Volksbank art collection enter into a dialogue with photographic works of art from the DZ BANK collection. The compilation illustrates how artists combine the different genres and create new artistic ones through the open, experimental use of material Find forms of expression.
In the thematic areas of portrait, body and figure, cityscape and abstraction, the exhibition takes a look at various facets of humanity and invites you to break through established thought structures in order to arrive at new perspectives.
The respective focal points of the two art collections play a decisive role: The Berliner Volksbank art collection, founded in 1985, had the motto “Images of People” from the outset and today focuses primarily on figurative art from the 1980s and 1990s from Berlin and East Germany. Its approximately 1,500 works by around 160 artists - paintings, sculptures, works on paper and prints - illuminate a crucial phase of awakening and upheaval in German-German history.
The DZ BANK collection, which is based on American conceptual art and includes over 10,000 works by almost 1,100 international artists, focuses in particular on photographic forms of expression. It sees itself as a mirror of photographic art production after 1945 and is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. These two succinct profiles create an inspiring field of tension in the exhibition in which questions of our present come into focus.
For example, the two title works by Loredana Nemes and Clemens Gröszer as well as the works by Andrzej Steinbach not only encourage a critical questioning of the portrait genre. They also invite us to become aware of automated, sometimes unconscious mechanisms that shape our social interaction.
The works of Horst Antes, René Graetz, Sven Johne, Via Lewandowsky and Lilly Lulay are about the conditions of being human. They examine how people find their self within complex social structures, and how they can define themselves as individuals despite existing political, social and personal restrictions and requirements.
Works like those by Wolfgang Tillmans, Rainer Fetting, Nan Goldin, Angela Hampel and VALIE EXPORT/Peter Weibel unsettle established role models, articulate (queer) self-image and demand visibility where none existed before.
In the second part of the exhibition, which can be seen on the first floor, the focus is on the urban environment created by humans. Here, Frank Darius' painterly-looking photographs resonate with Silke Miche's paintings, which at first glance could also be a digitally processed photograph - they both focus on everyday aspects of our world and subject the urban landscape to an aesthetic test.
People and their movement within an environment they have created is also the focus in Beate Gütschow's digitally created “three-dimensional photographs,” as she calls her work, as well as in Wolfgang Leber's painting, in which a figure stands out amidst architecturally arranged forms. And although Konrad Knebel's gray house fronts or Michael Schmidt's documentary Berlin cityscapes show deserted city landscapes, the subtle examination of the relationship between people and the city can also be found here.
Stefanie Seufert's towers, folded from photograms, refer to ideas of non-representational painting, such as those implemented on Reinhardt Grimm's canvas, and in doing so translate the photographic material into the third dimension.
The exhibition shows 90 works by 39 artists: Horst Antes (* 1936), Alexandra Baumgartner, Manfred Butzmann (* 1942), Frank Darius (* 1963), Christa Dichgans (1940-2018), Rainer Fetting (* 1949), Arno Fischer (1927-2011), Günther Förg (1952-2013), Nan Goldin (* 1953), René Graetz (1908-1974), Reinhardt Grimm (* 1958), Clemens Gröszer (1951-2014), Beate Gütschow (* 1970), Richard Hamilton (1922-2011), Angela Hampel (* 1956), Richard Heß (1937-2017), Sven Johne (* 1976), Veronika Kellndorfer (* 1962), Konrad Knebel (* 1932), Hans Laabs ( 1915-2004), Wolfgang Leber (* 1936), Via Lewandowsky (* 1963), Rolf Lindemann (1933-2017), Lilly Lulay (* 1985), Silke Miche (* 1970),
Additional information
Price info: Reduced admission for trainees, students, pensioners, welfare recipients, severely disabled persons with official ID, owners of ArtCard and Ehrenamtskarte.
Free admission for children and young people up to 18 years, school classes incl. teachers, representatives of the press, recipients of Bürgergeld, required accompanying person of severely disabled, artists and lenders of the exhibition, members of the following associations: International Council of Museums, International Association of Art, Berufsverband Bildender Künstler*innen Berlin e.V., Bundesverband Bildender Künstlerinnen und Künstler
Price: €5.00
Reduced price: €3.00
