with Rita Kersting, Deputy Director of Museum Ludwig in Cologne

Mural for a Photographer was painted 100 years ago by Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, a founding member of the Cologne Progressives. This radical group of artists was active between the end of the First World War in 1918 and the rise of National Socialism in Germany in 1933.

Throughout the 1920s, the Cologne Progressives joined a wave of international leftist movements in the art world and developed their own vocabulary of figurative abstraction, creating easily legible work meant to be accessible to all. In Mural for a Photographer, Seiwert applies this approach to bring the democratic spirit of photography and public murals to painting.

Join Rita Kersting, deputy director of Museum Ludwig in Cologne, to explore Seiwert’s artistic practice, its political dimensions, and his relationship with the photographer for whom the painting is named: August Sander.

This program is presented in partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago.

About the Speaker
Rita Kersting is an art historian and curator who has served as the deputy director of Museum Ludwig in Cologne since 2016. Previously, she was the Landeau Family Curator of Contemporary Art at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where she curated exhibitions like we the people, featuring artists such as Danh Võ and Shilpa Gupta. She is also a fellow of the International Curatorial Institute at MoMA and has been on the Supervisory Board of the Stedelijk Museum since 2014.