Isa Genzken 75/75 Celebrates 75 Sculptures & 75 Years of Life @ Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin

 
 

To mark Isa Genzken’s 75th birthday, the Neue Nationalgalerie is honoring the German artist with the exhibition Isa Genzken: 75/75, showing 75 sculptures spanning all phases of her oeuvre from the 1970s to the present. The presentation recalls displays of classical antiquity collections in its arrangement of individual sculptures in the Neue Nationalgalerie’s upper hall. In the configuration models, archetypes and assessments of the human and modern society emerge.

The sculptures are not hewn into form but rather embody in their heterogeneous materiality the technologies, plastic, concrete, decorations and functional objects that permeate daily life. Genzken transposes these reassessments and fluid framings into authenticity, beauty, absurdity and exaggeration. Her work derives from actualities, such as a window or the figure of an actor, which she then alters and distorts into her own realities and visual language. The individual, also her as an artist, and her biography are the instruments used in this scrutiny of Western culture’s ideals and types of production.

“The works are meant to function more as moving images than as sculptures, with a new view seen from every angle. Nothing is fixed or two-dimensional but rather cinematic,” said Isa Genzken in an interview in 2016. Visitors discover themselves being queried through the confrontation with familiar everydayness. Collages of personal worlds emerge. The viewers become participants, tools, and scales of measurement within the exhibition space, not least through reflections in the object surfaces.

75/75 is on view through November 27th at Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str. 50, 10785 Berlin.

Judit Reigl's First Museum Solo Exhibition in Germany Is Presented Posthumously @ Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin

 
 

To commemorate the centenary of Judit Reigl’s birth and the acquisition of three main works by this Hungarian-born French artist (1923 – 2020), the Neue Nationalgalerie is presenting her first-ever solo exhibition in a German museum. The Nationalgalerie is the first public collection in Germany to own works by this important painter closely associated with the French Art Informel movement in the 1950s.

This overview of Reigl’s career showcases a major figure in European art from the second half of the 20th century. On view are sixteen, mostly large-scale paintings from Reigl’s painted oeuvre ‒ works both abstract and figurative. The artist began her studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest. In 1950, the rise of Stalinism led Riegl to flee her homeland and settle in Paris. Although her early, mostly dream-like paintings were still indebted to Surrealism, she turned to lyrical abstraction at the start of the 1950s. Figurative elements are repeatedly found in Riegl’s paintings. In the mid-1960s, they would culminate in the male torsos in her Man series.

Judit Reigl
Man, Tripychon (1967-1969)
Oil on canvas 232.4 x 199.4 cm; 241.3 x 198.1 cm; 232.4 x 208.3 cm,
Fonds de dotation Judit Reigl, promised gift Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin© Fonds de Dotation Judit Reigl

Judit Riegl’s work will be on view through October 8th at Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str. 50, 10785 Berlin.