Art Calendar – Current Exhibitions in Germany

The future is the focus of the current exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Artists imagine it as catastrophic, paradisial or eternally redundant. In the early 1980s Joseph Beuys already rang in The End of the Twentieth Century with a sculpture consisting of a lift truck, basalt steles and pallets, and this work has given the exhibition its title. “The best is yet to come”, sang Frank Sinatra in 1959, which is the exhibition’s subtitle.

The show has been mounted mainly with works belonging to the collection of the businessman Erich Marx. Among the core pieces are works by Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. There are also works by artists of the younger generation.

The exhibition divides the artistic formulations of vision of the future into ten chapters. “The future wasn’t any better before”, a quip of Karl Valentin’s, is the title of one chapter; “The future belongs to the masses” is another and is devoted to utopias such as that envisaged by Communism, which Andy Warhol represented in 1976 with his silkscreen of a hammer and sickle.

A chapter is also dedicated to the idea of the future as the eternal recurrence of what has already happened. Again Warhol, the artist who constantly repeated everything – Marilyn Monroe, Campbell soup cans and electric chairs, is here on display. “The more you look at the same exact thing”, explained Warhol, “the more meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.”