Art Calendar – Current Exhibitions in Germany

Martin Eder paints fluffy kittens, erotic scenes and chameleons with dragonfly wings. His pictures are often criticized as kitschy. Now, together with works by Michael Kunze, Anselm Reyle and Thomas Scheibitz, they are on display at the exhibition Bube, Dame, König, Ass (JackQueenKingAce). The show, jointly mounted by the Berlinische Galerie, the Berliner Kunstwerke and the Kunsthalle der Deutschen Bank, wants to present artistic positions of the present and has to this end put together a kind of boyband of painting – one whose members are quite polarizing. The motto of this cooperation of Berlin museums, Painting Forever!, is intended to affirm that the medium of painting has its place in contemporary art. This is confirmed by the success of the four exhibited artists on the art market.

Though they all belong to the same generation, Eder, Kunze, Reyle and Scheibitz each has his own signature and been shaped by different influences. While Eder likes to work with representational motifs between cliché, idyll and confusion, Kunze’s utopian scenery and apocalyptic landscapes show the influence of Surrealism and Cubism. Some of Reyle’s best-known works are stripe paintings in garish colour combinations, for which he uses different materials such as acrylic paint, silver foil and varnish. And Scheibitz experiments in a region between abstraction and figuration, including the attempt to represent the human form in abstract forms.