Contemporary German Painting
Germany, with its numerous art academies and federally structured cultural landscape, has in addition to Berlin many other artistic centres and scenes in Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt am Main, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Dresden and Leipzig. In order to give a sketch of the highly productive German painting of the present, while avoiding falling into the post modern fussiness of finding each individual artistic position incomparable or as good as any other, it is worth making a few distinctions.
- How does an artist go about painting? Does he look at his subject with detachment, as if through a window, or does he find himself in the thick of everyday life?
- How does the pictorial and visual significance of painting unfold on the one hand and its textual and discursive significance on the other – for instance, in the transition from the picture in an exhibition to its review in a newspaper, or, conversely, in the adaptation of a (text-based) political opinion into an artistic statement?
- How can the art market and the art public be distinguished as sub-systems of the art world?
These three distinctions will help structure our tour through contemporary German painting.
