Art Genres: Media Art, Painting and Photography in Germany

Ever since the 1920’s, the decision to pursue painting has always also been a decision against a theory that presents itself as avant garde. Between 1915 and 1925 diverse artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Kasimir Malewitsch and Alexander Rodtschenko have proclaimed the end of painting – yet more pictures have been painted in the 20th century than ever before in history.

From conceptual painting to the Neo-Fauves

The late seventies were an inauspicious time for the figurative, representational painter. Conceptual painting was dominant: Gerhard Richter painted grey, two-dimensional pictures, whereas other, more figurative artists who belong today to the grand seigneurs of their art – Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer – were regarded as outsiders. At the end of the decade, however, young artists began to throw themselves into figurative painting with a sensuous verve. In Berlin they included Salomé, Reiner Fetting and Helmut Middendorf from the painting classes of K. H. Hödicke; in Cologne the Mülheimer Freiheit round Walter Dahn and J. G. Dokoupil. A New Spirit in Painting, the big 1981 exhibition at the London Royal Academy, helped establish this trend throughout Europe. The book Hunger nach Bildern (i.e., The Hunger for Images, 1982) by W. M. Faust and G. de Vries fostered the boom of neo-expressionist painting in Germany at the beginning of the eighties. With the exception of a short-lived counter-movement launched about 1984 under the motto ‘Neo-Geo’, the Neo-Fauves were the last trend within painting that could be marketed as a coherent style.

Farewell to the representation of the world

Since the mid-eighties and from the conceptual point of view, the quite large number of painters in Germany have mostly been on their own, and numerous personal styles co-exist alongside each other. Artists such as Günther Förg, who has also appeared as photographer and spatial artist, illustrate the availability of a broad spectrum of stylistic possibilities. In Förg’s work, there is no longer a meaningful distinction between ‘representational’ and ‘abstract’ pictures.

Der zerbrochene Spiegel (i.e., The Broken Mirror), the 1994 exhibition at the Hamburg Deichtorhallen, seemed again to confine the art form of painting to purely formal questions and leave the task of representing the world to the technical visual media. With reference to the French media theorist Paul Virilio, this presentation of international painters provides evidence for the view that today only the loner still has a chance and that it is no longer the function of pictures to contribute to the understanding of the visible world. Works by Richter, Polke, Baselitz and Förg, among others selected according to purely formal criteria, were meant to confirm this thesis.

Accelerated registration of reality: photography as competitor of painting?

Accordingly, many young artists still pursue a reflection on the technical possibilities of their medium without paying much attention to the representation of the seen world. Young painters like Martin Gerwers with his geometrical-like pictures, Corrine Wasmuht with her amorphous pictorial creations, and Katharina Grosse with her space-seizing and intensely colourful wall-paintings are examples of current positions within a kind of painting that is no longer fixed on a dominant style and develops the art form in diverse directions. The great success of photographers such as Andreas Gursky, Axel Hütte, Candida Höfer and Thomas Ruff, all students of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, and their gigantic formats which enter into direct competition with painting, made clearly conscious the lack of a kind of painting that confronts questions of representational art.

The boom of figurative painting in the nineties: between tradition and the modern movement

In the nineties, a new generation of young painters began to take up this challenge. These included, for example, Eberhard Havekost, Thomas Scheibitz, Franz Nitzsche and Neo Rauch, who came from East Germany and had studied in Dresden or Leipzig. Artists such as Matthias Weischer and Thomas Henninger, who came from West Germany, took advantage of the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall to study a more traditional form of painting at art academies of the former GDR (Dresden, Leipzig, Halle) which was no longer taught in the same way at West German schools.

The painting of this younger generation comes to grips with traditional genres, but also with the changes wrought in our perception by technical media like television, video, computers and the internet, yet without abandoning the medium of painting. Rather, they attempt to probe and extend the limits of what can be represented in painting. Their pictures are evidence for the persistent fascination with painting and make clear that this medium is still capable of new and irreplaceable statements. Painting in Germany at the beginning of the third millennium is more various than ever before; completely irreconcilable theoretical positions co-exist equally alongside each other. Everything is possible.