Retrospect starting 2004

With his work, Rudolf Wachter contributed significantly to the renewal of German wood sculpture in the 20th century. He always understood wood as a living material with which he entered into an intensive dialogue. Cutting with the chain saw into the middle of the usually freshly felled, still damp tree trunk was the starting point of his work from the 1970s onwards. Through this core or shrinkage cut of the sculptor into the heart of the trunk, the worked wood develops its form-giving power. In various groups of works, Rudolf Wachter explored the natural morphology of wood. In this way he succeeded in creating sculptures between organically grown and artistically designed form. To this day, his extensive oeuvre is a special symbiosis of art and nature, which can be felt and understood in the Museum Lothar Fischer with its impressive view of the Neumarkter Stadtpark.

The occasion for the special exhibition, which shows large sculptures and wall reliefs made of wood as well as uniques in bronze and a selection of drawings, is the 100th birthday of the artist. Born in 1923 in Bernried/Bodenseekreis, Rudolf Wachter initially completed an apprenticeship in his parents' carpentry workshop. During the Second World War he was seriously wounded as a soldier in Russia and lost a leg. From 1946 he trained as a wood sculptor in Oberammergau, then studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, finally as a master student with Josef Henselmann. After stays abroad in Greece and the USA, he lived with his wife Ulla Wachter and his five children in Munich, where he died in 2011.

Rudolf Wachter was, among other things, an honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts Munich and a recipient of the Bavarian Order of Merit and the Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Lothar Fischer, who was a close friend of Rudolf Wachter throughout his life, once said that his fellow sculptor had created "an impressive body of work, powerful and lively! It is great how he develops his lapidary forms in the sculptural process. For me he is a 'minimalist' sculptor in the best sense".

Publication 
Rudolf Wachter, Monograph and catalogue raisonné of wood sculpture, ed. Stefanje Weinmayr, Munich 2021 (Hirmer Verlag), 39.90 €

Thanks 
We would like to thank Veronika Wachter, the estate of Rudolf Wachter, Dr. Stefanje Weinmayr and the Werner Wohlhüter Gallery in Leibertingen for supporting the exhibition project.

Image: Lukas Pürmayr/Museum Lothar Fischer

The German-French artist Caroline Achaintre was born in Toulouse in 1969 and grew up in Fürth in Germany. Before her studies, which she completed at Goldsmiths University of London in 2003, she had qualified as a blacksmith. Since 2018, she has been a professor of textile art at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule in Halle. Today she lives and works in London.

Caroline Achaintre's many-faceted oeuvre is characterised by her use of a variety of materials and working techniques, some of which she combines conceptually. In addition to works on paper and in glazed ceramics, she mainly produces tapestries, which are outstanding for their sensual presence. For her large tapestries such as Mercury or Alberich, Caroline Achaintre uses the technique of tufting. In this procedure, separate wool threads are shot through the canvas from the rear by means of a pressure gun, so that the front side shows the subject. The process of creation is as mysterious as the resulting artwork, which is haptically fascinating and evokes associations with fluffy animal skins. The artist´s small ceramics, such as Dorrn, suggest cell formations or snake skins. The intimate watercolours, on the other hand, are reminiscent of puzzle pictures or the deep-psychological technique of the so-called Rorschach test. Mysterious mask forms, strange mythical figures, capricious heads or hybrid creatures become discernible in her work. Usually it is multi-layered characters or multiple identities that fascinate the artist and inspire her to create her works. Thus, Caroline Achaintre´s philosophical, psychological, motivical and thematic interest in the type of the Double in its ambiguity is also reflected in the title of this exhibition. For her work, the artist draws inspiration from both high and pop culture, from German Expressionism as well as folk art, but also from Central European carnival or animism all the way to horror, heavy metal and science fiction.

On the heels of her first solo museum exhibition in Germany, at the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, the Museum Lothar Fischer is paying tribute to the internationally renowned artist with over thirty works in a retrospective exhibition.

Catalogue: Caroline Achaintre. Shiftings, ed. Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Kunsthaus Centre d'art Pasq.uart, Biel, 2022 (German/English/French), 28 €. 
In parallel, the Neues Museum Nürnberg presents a Caroline Achaintre room with recent works, including the large all-view textile work Roadrunner from 2022

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) played an important role at the interface between figuration and abstraction, between tradition and experiment, and between Europe and America. As a representative of Abstract Expressionism, the leading direction in American painting in the 1950s, he is one of the most innovative and important artistic personalities of the 20th century.

Born in 1880 in Weißenburg in Middle Franconia, he attended a private drawing and painting school in Munich from 1898 before moving to Paris in 1904, where he met Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Robert Delaunay. After founding a school of fine arts in Munich in 1915, which attracted numerous students from abroad, Hans Hofmann held summer courses in Germany and abroad in the 1920s. Later he established himself as a professor at American teaching institutions. When the political situation in Germany became increasingly tense and his painting was considered degenerate, he did not return to Germany from the USA on the advice of his wife. In 1934 he opened the Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York. Hofmann's school not only shaped Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner, who studied there, but also influenced such important painters as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman.

In 2022, Hans Hofmann's largely unknown Chimbote designs for coloured murals, created in 1950, are on display in Germany for the first time. Two houses, the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern and the Museum Lothar Fischer, are now showing works that the painter created in collaboration with the architects Josep Lluís Sert and Paul Lester Wiener, who also worked in America. Although their urban design for the Peruvian town of Chimbote, which was developed after the end of the Second World War, was never realised, Hofmann's large-scale, colour-intensive pictorial works, which were meant to be realised as mosaics, convey a concentrated impression of this visionary project and of Hofmann's mastery of the art of mosaics and of his artistry in experimenting with form and colour.

Drawings, city maps, photographs and facsimile sketches of plans complete the exhibition. The painter's interest in a direct engagement with architecture also manifested itself after the Chimbote series: in 1956 he designed wall mosaics for the entrance hall of the William Kaufman Building in New York, and in 1958 he completed a mosaic for the façade of the New York School of Printing.

The sculptor Lothar Fischer (1933-2004) was also involved with architecture-related art throughout his life. As early as 1963, together with the artists' group SPUR, he designed the well-known SPUR building as a visionary architectural model. In 2004, in close cooperation with the architectural firm Berschneider + Berschneider, a specifically designed museum was created for the presentation of his sculptural work.

Catalogue German/English, edited by Britta E. Buhlmann, published by DCV Verlag, Berlin 2022, 24 €.

Project management: Dr. Annette Reich, Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern.

Special thanks to the Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust, New York, who generously supported the exhibition and catalogue and thus made them possible.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

2021, the Norwegian-German artist Verena Issel (*1982) was granted the Lothar Fischer Art Prize. The endowed prize, which is awarded every two years by the Lothar & Christel Fischer Foundation in cooperation with the city of Neumarkt i.d.OPf., is always linked to an exhibition in the following year.

In her mostly walk-in room installations, Verena Issel presents enigmatic, playful or humorous scenarios behind which the serious socio-critical approach is not visible at first glance. The interlocking pictures and objects live from the diversity of the individual parts and give the impression that they are communicating with each other. In her Neumarkt room installation Everyday Objects (female eco system), she places large still lives on black cardboard backgrounds on the walls. The composition is complemented by free-standing objects and coloured stencil-like elements embedded in the black felt floor. Mostly, one recognises household utensils or other objects of daily use that have feminine connotations. The things are staged rather cheerfully, but through their function and the context in which they are placed the female world is questioned. Thematically, the artist deals with the everyday life of women, as it is still attributed or ascribed to them as a matter of course, especially in Germany.

"Often unpaid or underpaid activities that are pushed into the domestic, supposedly private sphere are shown here. Care work, such as childcare and care for the elderly, cooking, hygiene and sex work become visible in supposedly cheerful colourful still lives." Formally, however, Verena Issel's installation is also about the interplay of two- and three-dimensionality.

For her multifaceted work, the artist prefers to use materials such as polystyrene, textiles, rubber, plastic or felt, but also found objects that are integrated into the spatial events. One example is her jungle depiction Sad Tropics with the crooked palm trees, which deliberately alludes to plastic consumption and the overexploitation of nature. To complement the installation on the ground floor of the museum, etchings, wood prints, collages and felt works are presented on the upper floor. Most of them were created during Verena Issel's 2021 Griffelkunst scholarship in Hamburg.

From 2002 to 2011, Verena Issel completed a double degree: she studied fine art at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts with Franz Erhard Walther and Pia Stadtbäumer and at the same time classical philology at the University of Hamburg. Numerous travel scholarships and awards have taken her to Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Lithuania, Papua New Guinea, China and Russia. She artistically translates the diverse travel impressions and encounters into her works, which often convey a decidedly political message. Verena Issel, who now lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg, is certainly one of the most interesting object and installation artists of her generation, also in an international context.

Special thanks go to the 2021 Proposal Committee consisting of Dr. Sebastian Baden, Prof. Dr. Harald Falckenberg, Maya Heckelmann, Benjamin Houlihan, Dr. Reinhard Spieler and Dr. Harriet Zilch, as well as to the decision-making body consisting of the members of the Board of Directors and Board of Trustees of the Lothar & Christel Fischer Foundation. Chairperson of the Award Jury: Dr. Selima Niggl.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Günter Haese, born in Kiel in 1924 and diseased in Hanover in 2016, started a steep career as a sculptor in 1962, when, only a few years after completing his studies at the Art Academy Düsseldorf, he detected brass wire as a material for his sculptural work. From then on, he created his three-dimensional objects from brass wire and components of disassembled clocks, such as hairsprings and cogwheels etc. In 1963, he was awarded the Young West Art Prize, before he had solo shows at the Ulm Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Invitations to documenta III in Kassel (1964), the Venice Biennale (1966) and the São Paulo Biennial and numerous international exhibitions and honours followed. Henry Moore, who visited Günter Haese in his Düsseldorf studio in 1965, was deeply fascinated by his younger colleague´s filigree wire structures. To this day Haese´s seemingly weightless “spatial graphics” form a convincing counterweight to a block-like, static conception of sculpture. “I´m not concerned with volume or mass, but rather with the balancing of heaviness and lightness, of compression and permeability of the materials”, Haese said in 2014, “it is the attempt to translate graphic moments into space.” In their poetic tenderness and idiosyncratic grace, Haese´s spatial sculptures are extremely charming and enigmatic structures. They combine the constructive precision of technical equipment with the individual growth forms of natural organisms; every slight breeze causes them to gently vibrate. 
Around 25 works from the artist´s estate (Courtesy Galerie Thomas, Munich) are shown in Neumarkt, supplemented by a few works from private collections. In addition to the sculptures, some of the early monotypes in which Günter Haese prepared his “spatial drawings” are also on display.
The exhibition is a cooperation with the Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl and the Ernst Barlach Haus – Hermann D. Reemtsma Foundation in Hamburg.
During the exhibition the film “Günter Haese. Ein Grenzgänger zwischen Leicht bewegt und Stillstand (A border crosser between lightly moved and standstill)“ by Werner Raeune from 2014 will be shown, and a 46-page catalogue with a text by Reinhard Spieler and a studio conversation with Günter Haese from 1966 will accompany the Neumarkt exhibition.10 €.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

In autumn 1959, the painter and glass artist Erwin Eisch (*1927), the sculptor Gretel Stadler (*1937) and the sculptor Max Strack (*1934) founded the group RADAMA. Unlike SPUR (1957-1965), the group that Erwin Eisch and Gretel Stadler initially belonged to, RADAMA wanted to focus on sculpture.

RADAMA became known far beyond the borders of Bavaria through the "Bolus Krim Memorial Exhibition" at the Malura Gallery in Munich in January 1961.

The exhibition provoked a "scandal" after a journalist revealed that its protagonist

Bolus Krim - the tragic life of the genius as well as his premature death - was nothing but an invention of the artists' group.

The press pounced on this "deception" and accused the exhibitors of trying to use it as a tool for marketing their own work.

The group´s artistic concern was completely ignored in the process and was hardly ever acknowledged in the subsequent reception:

In 1961, three successive weekly exhibitions had been planned, largely composed of the same works and thus also addressing questions of context and cliché. After the scandal about the first show, the second special show, "Art and Living Space", was still installed, the third however, "Sacred Art", never got materialised.

The exhibition at the Museum Lothar Fischer presents the works of the 2019 RADAMA donation by Erwin and Gretel Eisch (married since 1962) from Frauenau to the Lothar & Christel Fischer Foundation. In addition to sculptures made of glass, ceramics, stone, wood and bronze, as well as paintings and drawings, there are numerous documents on display, which, among other things, show the connection to the "Situationist International". In addition, a number of old black-and-white photographs of 1961 have been used to reconstruct parts of the historic exhibition, with contemporary furniture and objects of everyday use, to provide a vivid impression of the original exhibition.
Here, for the first time, a hitherto little-known position of German art of the 1960s is presented, whose innovative power and vitality hold surprises even for young artists today.
The special exhibition will subsequently be shown at Museum SPUR and Cordonhaus in Cham.

A catalogue edited by Margrit Brehm and Pia Dornacher (Edition Metzel, Munich 2021, 160 p., 25 €) was published in December 2021.

Image: Marcus Rebmann/Museum Lothar Fischer

With this exhibition, the work of the painter Uwe Lausen (1941-1970) is for the first time placed in connection with the photographic works of his wife Heide Stolz (1939-1985).

Staging, provocation, breaking taboos, violence - the works of the artist couple are without equivalent in the 1960s. They were created in a period which was marked by considerable upheavals and radical changes and in which a new generation vehemently broke with conventions. The canvases and works on paper by Uwe Lausen as well as the photographs by Heide Stolz tell of the role of the individual in the changing social context of the time.

Uwe Lausen's early work was still influenced by the expressive-figurative paintings of the Munich artists' group SPUR (1957-1965). From the middle of the decade onwards, under the influence of the emerging English and American Pop Art, Lausen shifted to realistic motifs. Heide Stolz's photographs evolved from portraits and surrealist-influenced collages to imaginative, at times unsparing stagings. Often enough, the two young daughters of the couple, who were married since 1962, were also integrated in these photographic projects. Lausen's and Stolz's works repeatedly reveal mutual exchange and influence. Both of them trace the contradictions and tensions in post-war German society. Among other things, the generation of their parents with their persistent denial of recent German history as well as the suppression of autonomous individual action is in the focus of the discussion.

On Sept. 14, 1970, at the age of 29, Uwe Lausen committed suicide. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Uwe Lausen's death, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz - Museum Gunzenhauser paid tribute to the work of the self-taught artist with a retrospective curated by Selima Niggl. As a third station the Museum Lothar Fischer shows the extensive double exhibition in a reduced and modified form.

We would like to thank the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz - Museum Gunzenhauser, the Museum DASMAXIMUM KunstGegenwart, Traunreut, as well as private collectors who do not wish to be named, for the loans.

Selima Niggl's book "Uwe Lausen – Übermorgen bin ich tot" (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne 2021, 351 pages, 59 €) is to be published during the exhibition.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

This retrospective exhibition provides the first comprehensive insight into the multifaceted oeuvre of the painter Helmut Sturm and sheds light on his various work phases. Throughout his life, he understood the canvas as a "spatially moving playing field" in which the representational and the abstract are combined with "all kinds of junk from the toy box of reality". Helmut Sturm, who was born in Furth im Wald in the Upper Palatinate in 1932 and died in Munich in 2008, made the permanent questioning of his painting his life's work. Today, his colourful works are among the most significant examples of abstract expressive painting after 1945 in Germany.
In 1957, Helmut Sturm was a co-founder and initiator of the society-critical artists' group SPUR and at times belonged to the Situationist International (S.I.) based in Paris. Consequently, he was not only in lively exchange with national and international movements, but also contributed significantly to the artistic spirit of awakening in the 1960s. Inspiring years followed with the artist groups SPURWIR (1965), GEFLECHT (1966-1968) and KOLLEKTIV HERZOGSTRASSE (1976-1982). In his involvement with these artist groups, he gradually developed his highly independent formal language. He was always concerned with the dynamics of the painting process, the pictorial and colour space that spreads over the painting surface and the interplay between construction and spontaneous gesture. His artistic achievements also reflect his early involvement with Cubism and Informel as well as his preoccupation with the painters Wassily Kandinsky, Max Beckmann, Asger Jorn, Willem de Kooning and later, above all, Emilio Vedova.
In addition to painting, Helmut Sturm's attention was focused on politics, writers and thinkers, classical music and jazz. Even during his teaching career as a professor of painting at the Berlin University of the Arts (Hochschule der Künste), and the Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der Bildenden Künste) in Munich, he was in lively exchange with colleagues and students and set far-reaching impulses. Always interested in togetherness, he was an important group initiator and comrade-in-arms. Lothar Fischer saw his SPUR friend as the "group leader" who always held everyone together. But Helmut Sturm also saw the group as an important "disruptive factor" that should prevent its members from remaining stuck in one painting style. And so Helmut Sturm was in dialogue throughout his life: with his students, fellow artists, group members, his family and above all with the canvas and his painting.

At the Museum Lothar Fischer, Sturm's works are shown, on a selective basis, in conjunction with sculptures by Lothar Fischer.

The retrospective is a cooperation with the Kunsthalle Emden, the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg and the Helmut Sturm archive.
A catalogue, published by Hirmer Verlag, German/English, 240 p., is available at the museum for 29.90 Euros.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Berschneider + Berschneider, Architekten und Innenarchitekten, Pilsach

Rather unusual for a Sculpture Museum, this special exhibition pays tribute to the Spanish painter, draftsman and graphic artist Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, an outstanding figure in the history of European art, but not a sculptor. Born in 1746 near Zaragoza and deceased in 1828 in Bordeaux, Goya is one of the leading artistic personalities of his time. And this not only as a portraitist and court painter of Charles IV, but as an artist who sets new standards, especially with his graphic œuvre. His medium is etching, often in connection with the aquatint technique, whose handling he develops to mastery. To this day Francisco de Goya is not only regarded as one of the last great court painters, but with his expressive and surreal imagery he is also considered one of the first pioneers of modernism.

Three of his four famous sequences of etchings are presented on two exhibition floors: Los Caprichos (80 sheets, published in 1799), Los Desastres de la Guerra (82 sheets, completed in 1820), and La Tauromaquia (33 sheets, 1815-1816). All 195 prints show Francisco de Goya as a sharp-eyed observer, who critically reflects the ecclesiastical, social and political grievances of his time. In 1797, at the age of 51, he starts the enigmatic picture cycle Los Caprichos (moods, Ideas), which marks a turning point in his artistic work. Deafened by a serious illness, Goya  increasingly withdraws from courtly events and public duties and works more independently. In his second series, Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Horrors of War), starting in 1810, he depicts the atrocities committed in the struggle of the rebellious Spanish population against Napoleon's soldiers. In this series of pictures, which were published only after his death, Goya shows the terrible crimes against humanity committed on both sides, but he does not take a stand. For La Tauromaquia (The Bullfight) he finally etches dramatic scenes of fighting between man and animal, a popular subject at the time, in unusual perspectives,.The exhibition is concluded by the famous sheet Modo de Volar (A Way to Fly), a key work of Goya's last series of 22 prints, Los Disparates (Folly, Stupidity, 1816-1824).

The etchings on display are from the renowned collection of the Morat Institute for Art and Art Science in Freiburg i. Br. All of them are prints from first editions and show highest quality. Therefore, the Neumarkt Goya-Show is not only a great pleasure quantitatively but also qualitatively, for art lovers in general and for connoisseurs of graphic arts in particular.

» Video: Francisco de Goya

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

In 2019 Benjamin Houlihan, born in Olpe in 1975 and now living in Düsseldorf, received the endowed sponsorship prize with the focus on sculpture. The prize is awarded every two years by the Lothar & Christel Fischer Foundation and the city of Neumarkt and is combined with an exhibition in the following year.
With Benjamin Houlihan, the jury, chaired by Marie-José van de Loo, has chosen an artist who, after his training as a stonemason, began his art studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, which he completed in 2007 as a master student of Georg Herold. In his work, which oscillates between representationalism and abstraction, Benjamin Houlihan links painting, sculpture and architecture with irony and lightness across genres.
This is also the case with his reliefs and sculptures made of coloured polyurethane foam, which, due to the materials used, require him to work quickly. The artist consciously deals with the relationship between body, space and surroundings as well as mass and volume. "How do you embody mass, how emptiness, and what does space mean?" asks Houlihan, who sees himself as a "classical sculptor". He cleverly explores the viewing habits and perception of the viewer and continually puts our ideas of the familiar to the test. This is also illustrated by his room installation with small sculptures made of tin, such as a mushroom, cock or balloon, which he places on the floor without a pedestal as if it were a matter of course. Comparable to small living beings, the figures and objects sometimes stand alone, sometimes they enter into a secret dialogue with each other or act as a group. Depending on whether the observer takes a frog or bird's-eye view, he or she can either become intensively involved in the world of figures or remain an observing outsider. "How do you find your way in the world? What is a border and where does it take place? What creates belonging and what proportionality? What is identity? What is closeness, what is distance? What is something and what is nothing?" These are the questions that the prize winner sees himself confronted with again and again.
In his artistic work, the pewter casts are directly related to his drawings, which he in turn always places in a sculptural context. In the exhibition, the large, powerful, colourful reliefs made of polyurethane foam are purposely juxtaposed with the small, poetic-looking tin casts. Both work complexes testify Benjamin Houlihan's highly independent and lively pictorial thinking, which, despite the international presence of the artist, still needs to be discovered in all its complexity.

Our sincere thanks go to the nomination committee for the Lothar Fischer Prize 2019:
Dr Stefan Borchardt, Dr Marion Bornscheuer, Johan Holten, Barbara Leicht M.A., Prof. Olaf Metzel and Leunora Salihu, and to the decision-making committee, consisting of members of the Executive Board and the Board of Trustees of the Lothar & Christel Fischer Foundation.

Image: Marcus Rebmann/Museum Lothar Fischer

The special exhibition presents sculptures and drawings by two artists of different origins and generations; but the works of both of them offer deep insights. Born in 1982 in Shiga Prefecture, Shinichi Sawada, a Japanese who was diagnosed with autism at an early age, communicates himself by his imaginative ceramics. Alfred Kremer, born in Regensburg in 1895, a painter by profession, in his last years of life from 1962 to 1965 created numerous small-format ink drawings in which inner experience and external events, suppressed fears and hidden desires of a man scarred by two world wars come to light.

Shinichi Sawada began working with clay in 2000 at a local social facility for mentally impaired people. Since then, he has been developing his distinctive ceramics in a simple workshop with a kiln built in the mountains. They are fantastic creatures, plastic variations of about fifteen different motifs with specific repetitive features.

With their prickly surfaces, they show their very own cosmos. However, since Sawada hardly communicates verbally, little is known about the origins and backgrounds of his ideas. Only the indication that they are marine animals comes from him. At the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, his idiosyncratic works were shown in the Encyclopedic Palace. This main exhibition of the art show gave the Japanese a great public and for the first time decoupled his work from the context of Outsider Art.

Alfred Kremer served on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, where he was buried alive just before the end of the war. He survived, but the experiences of war accompanied him throughout his life. After the war he first studied arts at the School of Applied Arts in Munich, later physical education in Berlin, where he worked from 1925 to 1940 as a sports teacher and radio journalist. His last years of life were overshadowed by a severe chronic arthropathy, which forced him to the sickbed in Weilheim three years before his death in 1965. Facing death, severely restricted in his mobility, he created a wealth of expressive drawings that not only reflect his physical life situation, but also his mental state. As early as 1964, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München honored him with a show of works.

Both artists, Shinichi Sawada and Alfred Kremer, are loners whose haunting works are created in discourse with their innermost being. In the exhibition INNER LIFE, they become visible to the outside world in dialogue with each other.

Thanks to the lenders: Our thanks for the ink drawings go to Kunsthalle Emden – Donation Otto van de Loo, to Galerie Florian Sundheimer and last not least to the private collectors, who do not want to be named.
For the ceramics we would like to thank the Halle Saint Pierre Museum, Paris.

The exhibition at the Museum Lothar Fischer Neumarkt and the Georg Kolbe Museum Berlin (June 21.- Sept.13, .2020) is Shinichi Sawada's first institutional solo exhibition in Europe.
A catalogue is available (German/English, 64 p., € 10).

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Gotthard Graubner, born in 1930 in Erlbach, Saxony, and deceased in 2013 on the Museum Island Hombroich near Neuss, Germany, deals with the nuances and layers of colour, with pictorial space, and sound in his oeuvre like hardly any other painter. In an international context, too, the Düsseldorf university professor, who created great paintings for Bellevue Palace and the Reichstag building, is one of the outstanding artists of his generation.

As early as the early 1960s, the painter left the two-dimensional canvas and developed his first colour fades, object-like cushion paintings, and from 1970 his colour space bodies. In the latter, the canvas arches over a lining of foam or synthetic wadding, giving the works a tangible physicality. Like a thin skin, the colour stretches over the soft carrier, which seems to breathe like an organism. The works Ibiza and Schwall also have a special haptic quality. Yet, objecthood is not the painter's primary concern, but materiality and the emancipation and autonomy of colour. In the end, colour spreads over the picture surface as if by itself and conquers the unlimited space.

In his works on paper and his graphic prints, Graubner also succeeds in giving the pictures three-dimensionality through layering and the exploration of colour. He sensitively experiments with colour values, -moods or sounds. Complementary colour contrasts or contrasts such as heavy and light or warm and cold, are also important. In the eighties, some of Graubner's works reveal his lively move towards gesture, while later works prove his intensive occupation with hand-made paper and pure colour pigments.

With around 40 exhibits, the overview exhibition offers a very good insight into the oeuvre of the great German painter. At the same time, the presentation pays tribute to the Nuremberg brush manufacturer, gallery owner and collector Hansfried Defet, who died in October 2016. This is the first time that, in addition to cushion paintings and colour space bodies from the Defet private collection, works on paper are also exhibited in dialogue with the donation of Marianne and Hansfried Defet to the Neues Museum Nürnberg.

Our thanks for the generous loans go to the Defet Collection, the Neues Museum Nürnberg, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe and to the private collectors who do not wish to be named.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Gustav Kluge, born in 1947 in Wittenberg, Germany, deals with existential pictorial themes and human questions both in expressive paintings and in his works on paper. It is about life and death, about power and violence exercised or endured, about injury and vulnerability.

Kluge, professor at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe from 1996 to 2014, finds his pictorial motifs through his involvement with cultural and contemporary history as well as religion. Today Gustav Kluge lives and works in Hamburg and is one of the most important international painters of his generation.

In the exhibition Rote Watte (Red Wadding), which got its title from one of the exhibits and comprises around 40 works, printing blocks and woodblock prints are put into dialogue for the first time. But the focus is on the printing blocks. Made from old plank floors, door panels, blockboards or assembled logs, they are by no means just tools for the reproduction of pictures. With their painterly settings, they can rather be understood as living reliefs or independent sculptures that, despite the brittle and heavy material, show the artist's high sensitivity. After the production of the coloured printing block, Kluge usually only takes a single print or a few variants on glassine, canvas or gauze. There is only a partial print of Kegelspiegel, and there are no prints at all of Neue Münze or KOAN. This is further proof that the printing blocks are autonomous works.

Moreover, through the painterly elements, through the partial collage of forms, the mostly large-formate hand prints acquire plastic features. Those sheets, comparable with monotypes, are always unique specimens, which consequently have a special significance in Kluge's work. Unlike most other painters, the artist consciously enlivens and expands the technical possibilities of the printing block and of wood printing. The centuries-old technique of woodblock printing has always demanded something convincingly new from Kluge. The result is a highly independent and diverse oeuvre, where there is still much to be discovered and explored.

The exhibition is a cooperation with Horst-Janssen-Museum Oldenburg and Kunstmuseum Reutlingen. A catalogue of the printing blocks 1984-2018 is available.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Sebastian Kuhn, born 1977 in Krumbach, Swabia, produces floor and ceiling works, spatial objects and site-specific installations from various materials of our everyday life. He develops sculptural works for both interior and exterior spaces. Through his unconventional combination of material he puts these everyday objects and familiar materials into a completely new context.

The sculptor studied under the professors Tim Scott and Claus Bury at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. In 2001, he received major inspiration during a working stay in Santiago de Chile, later at Hiroshima City University and, after completing his studies in Nuremberg in 2006, during his DAAD scholarship in London. In 2007, he graduated with distinction from the Wimbledon College of Arts with a master's degree in sculpture. Today, the prize-winning artist, who has been honoured with exhibitions at home and abroad, lives and works in Nuremberg.

At the centre of the exhibition is his work Polyrhythmic Walkabout. Here, PVC elements, stainless steel, screws and wool are brought together with the bodies of two concert grand pianos and of a short grand pianoforte. Sebastian Kuhn constructively combines these very different objects to form an exciting sculpture. Spatial experience and physical perception are essential aspects of his sculptural work. It is therefore also important to him that the viewer can walk around his works. In the wall-mounted works of the series The Kubrick Sessions or Display Devices one discovers steel pipes, remains of foam and carpet, leather upholstery, cables, neon tubes, washbasin holders or plastic trays. In DIY stores and household shops, Kuhn often finds the most curious things for his compositions, which are located between figuration and abstraction.

His interest in the history of art and film as well as jazz music, which he also practises himself as a percussionist, provides him with important impulses for his art. Initially, he also found artistic inspiration in the American sculptor David Smith, who assembled sculptures from found objects, and in the British sculptor Anthony Caro. Even though Kuhn's work contains some exciting references to older colleagues, he soon developed his own contemporary cosmos of ideas: an interplay of materials and objects as well as of the supposed reference to everyday life and the works of art. Sebastian Kuhn titles the exhibition Fray, which can mean quite different things, such as fight, rag, wear, tear, scare. This deliberately ambiguous title refers to the strategies Kuhn uses in creating his complex sculptures.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

In cooperation with the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne, which houses the world's largest collection of the artist's works, the Museum Lothar Fischer is showing a representative cross-section of Käthe Kollwitz's work.  A year after the artist´s 150th birthday, more than 40 graphic and sculptural works of the internationally renowned artist, loans from Cologne, are on display in Neumarkt. The very motif of couples being connected in love or in pain, in poverty, grief, or death, runs through her entire oeuvre like a red thread.

Käthe Kollwitz was born as Käthe Schmidt in Königsberg in 1867.  Supported by her father at an early age, she was one of the first women to study at the Artists' School in Berlin and at the Ladies' Academy in Munich. In 1891 she married Dr. Karl Kollwitz, a physician, and moved with him to Berlin, where her sons Hans (1892) and Peter (1896) were born. The latter lost his life as a war volunteer at the age of 18. Käthe Kollwitz, who also worked as a sculptor from 1909 onwards, repeatedly recorded this painful loss in her art. In 1919, she was the first woman to become a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, and at the same time she was appointed professor. But in the course of Hitler's takeover she was, like Heinrich Mann, forced by the NS government to resign from the academy. When Karl Kollwitz died in 1940, she created the small sculpture Farewell in memory of her husband. In 1943, after the Allied air raids, she left Berlin. Her apartment with her studio on Prenzlauer Berg as well as numerous works were destroyed by the bombs. On the invitation of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony, she went to Moritzburg, where she died on April 22, 1945, only a few days before the end of the war.

As an artist she always took a critical position.  In her graphic series such as Der Weberaufstand (1893-97), Bauernkrieg (1902-08), and Proletariat (1924/25), for example, she was eager to depict what war, poverty, suffering, unemployment, and illness make of people. With her often shockingly realistic drawings and sculptures, which in many cases refer to her personal circumstances and experiences, she has documented a piece of shattering contemporary history. As an astute and sensitive observer she was also able - and this is rather unknown to a broader public - to capture interpersonal privacy and deep connections, so that belonging, motherhood happiness or intimate togetherness become visible. Charcoal drawings such as Pair of Lovers Nestling Together or Pair of Lovers Embracing Each Other are convincing examples in this respect. Moreover, like the bronze Liebespaar and many other works of the artist, they show self-portrait-like features. Käthe Kollwitz's life and work - maternity and artistry - are closely interwoven, which becomes clear again and again in the exhibition "Couples, Connected in Love and in Pain".

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

In 2017, Leunora Salihu, born in 1977 in Prishtina in Kosovo, received the endowed Lothar Fischer Prize with a focus on contemporary sculpture. This prize, awarded every second year since 2005 by the Lothar & Christel Fischer Foundation and the City of Neumarkt, is associated with an exhibition in the following year.

Leunora Salihu, who now lives and works in Düsseldorf, studied graphic design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prishtina before fleeing to Germany in 1999.

She began her studies with German, art history and free art in Kiel, then went to the Art Academy in Düsseldorf and became a master student of Prof. Tony Cragg.

Leunora Salihu's works are situated in a field of tension between abstraction and figurativeness. They bear witness to the artist´s excellent feeling for form paired with a technically elaborate and at the same time intuitively guided handling of different materials such as wood, metal, gypsum, multiplex panels, ceramics and plastics. Her creations reveal an enormous knowledge of materials and a very special formal language. Although Salihu´s works are strictly and clearly designed, they appear light and playful at the same time due to the lively variety of shapes and materials and sizes.

The same intensive examination of space and form can be seen in the ink drawings, which are created parallel to the sculptures.

Propeller shows an unusual combination of material: Layered MDF panels are contrasted with a fragile, open-work ceramic form that takes up the rotational movement of a propeller like the wooden plates do.

In Urknall (Big Bang), an almost five-metre long and over two-metre high body of space, the sculptor also unites contrasts such as lightness and heaviness, standstill and movement or interior and exterior space. This is particularly evident in the two different round shapes. Big Bang is a work full of tension, which, however, seems to be resting within itself.

Welle (Wave) evinces an impressive interplay between square wooden panels and organic-looking green ceramic elements. In a repeating vertical stratification, different shape segments are built up into a column. What is interesting is that the artist does not design the wave horizontally but vertically. "I am looking for something supertemporal in form and material, paired with temporal aspects of movement. It appeals to me to condense such contrasts in a clear picture," says Leunora Salihu in an interview.

After solo exhibitions at the K21 Ständehaus in Düsseldorf, at Galerie Thomas Schulte Berlin and at Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, among others, Museum Lothar Fischer is now showing objects and drawings by the prize-winner, who convinced the jury of experts with her independent and sustainable artistic imagery.

Thanks is owed to the suggestion committee of the Lothar Fischer Prize 2017:

Prof. Axel Heil, Staatl. Akademie der bildenden Künste (State Academy of Fine Arts) Karlsruhe; Dr. Eva Huttenlauch, Städt. Galerie am Lenbachhaus Munich; Dr. Nicole Fritz, Kunsthalle Tübingen; Dr. Thomas Heyden, Neues Museum Nuremberg; Werner Wohlhüter, gallerist; Stefan Rohrer, Lothar Fischer Prize Winner 2015.

We would also like to thank the decision-making committee, consisting of the Executive Board and the Board of Trustees of the Lothar & Christel Fischer Foundation. Chairwoman of the jury: Marie-José van de Loo.

Image: Marcus Rebmann/Museum Lothar Fischer

The present exhibition at Museum Lothar Fischer is dedicated to David Nash (*1945 in Esher/Surrey), one of the most important European sculptors. Nash, who studied at the academies of fine arts in Kingston and Brighton and at the Chelsea School of Art in London in the 1960s, has been awarded numerous prizes. He is a member of the Royal Academy of Arts and a knight of the British Empire.

Since the end of the 1960s, David Nash has been living and working in North Wales, where in 1967 he bought a deconsecrated church and turned it into his workshop. There, in an area of forested hills he has created his characteristic single sculptures in wood and in bronze as well as his renowned nature installations and landscape projects.

In all his works David Nash explores nature and puts the focus of his creative work on the idea of the living tree. “From tree to form” is the credo of the sculptor, who transforms the sensuality of nature into sculpture, gives the wooden material an artistic structure. The proportions of his wooden sculptures are usually predetermined by the chosen raw material and the dimensions of the tree trunks. In most cases, Nash prefers used wood, matured timber. But he also turns freshly cut branches or even living trees into objects of art, always considering the different colours and structures of his material. He also likes experiments with burnt or carbonized wood. Unlike the representatives of American land art, Nash considers the idea of protecting the environment. He would not dream of felling a tree for his art.

Red and Black Cross Column is a sculpture whose burnt-in red and black crosses indirectly refer to destruction and extinction. For his sculpture Sliced Egg he takes one of the basic shapes in nature and in life, but manages to make out of the waxed wood an artistic form which is unnatural and creates a  tension with the natural material from which it is formed. In this respect it bears a resemblance to Red Sliced Pod, where the sculptor by cutting serial structures into the massive pieces of wood gives the material a playful airiness.

The fascinating views over the nearby park that the museum offers to its visitors underline how profoundly Nash´s sculptural work is determined by nature. And this 42^nd special exhibition at Museum Lothar Fischer with about 40 works by David Nash is an excellent example again of the harmony of architecture, sculpture and nature.

We owe a debt of gratitude to David Nash and Galerie Scheffel, Bad Homburg, for the cooperation and the generous loans.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Max Beckmann, painter, graphic artist, sculptor and university professor, was born in Leipzig in 1884. His works being stigmatized as ”degenerate art“, Beckmann left Germany in 1937 and escaped to Amsterdam, from where he went to the United States later. He died in New York in 1950. Beckmann, a lone wolf in the art scene throughout his lifetime, is one of the most important representatives of modernism, and numerous artists of the post-war period gained inspiration from his works and in a way followed in his tracks. So did SPUR, a group of artists founded in Munich by Lothar Fischer, Heimrad Prem, Helmut Sturm and HP Zimmer in 1957. SPUR, which reportedly owed its name to a track (German: Spur) in the snow, existed until 1965.

Both parts of the exhibition „Max Beckman auf der SPUR“ serve two purposes: to provide an insight into Beckmann´s graphic oeuvre and - for the very first time – to show his artistic influence on SPUR.

Part I displays drawings in pencil, charcoal, chalk, and pastel that show Beckmann´s range of techniques and of subjects, such as nudes, still lives, interiors, landscapes, and portraits. In addition to that, the exhibition provides a certain chronological overview of Beckmann´s graphic work, beginning with a nude from 1914 and ending with a portrait from 1950.

It is especially the portraits, such as Naila (cover), that reflect Beckmann´s personal relationships with his family, his wives, and his friends.

Although Beckmann´s graphic art ought to be considered an independent group within his oeuvre, you will often find similarities with his famous paintings in museums worldwide.

Most of the pieces on display here are loans from the Museum of Fine Arts (Museum der bildenden Künste) in Leipzig and come from the estate of Max Beckmann´s second wife, Mathilde Q. Beckmann.

The focus of part II of the project is on Beckmann´s lithography Die Hölle (Hell), a large-format eleven-piece series from 1919. We know that the members of SPUR saw it in Munich, at the art gallery of Günther Franke, Beckmann´s enterprising art dealer and collector. How fascinated they were by Beckmann´s Die Hölle and by his famous painting Die Nacht (Night), which Franke owned as well, is obvious in SPUR works around 1960.  What especially inspired them was the composition of faceted figures in Beckmann`s works around 1920.

”Occasionally“, wrote HP Zimmer, “I went to Günther Franke and asked him to show me pictures of Beckmann´s, so that I would not forget, in the midst of all that informal abstract art, that one could still draw figures. (…) Beckmann´s edgy, clipped, faceted style as a firmly depicted seam of overlapping elements was a natural reference point . It gave the pictures sort of depth and suction.“

Max Beckmann, however, did not only serve the young SPUR artists as a role model for their faceted paintings, sculptures and drawings. Highly interested in society and politics of the 1960s, they also appreciated the famous artist for his social criticism.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Her drawings overarch spaces. Monika Grzymala (*1970 in Zabrze, Poland) is an internationally renowned artist, who has lived in Germany for many years and is now based in Berlin. After finishing her training as a stone sculptor, she studied Liberal Arts with Bogomir Ecker at the  Hamburg Hochschule für bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts of Hamburg) and in 2003 she was awarded a DAAD scholarship in New York. Her drawings are not drawings in the traditional sense. She thinks and works the way a sculptor does. With her spatial drawings, - whose linealogy is predetermined by the shape and materiality of her special, mostly dark tapes, - she explores, understands, feels, occupies and animates rooms in a three-dimensional way. Motion leads to kilometre-long lineages and most versatile formations. “Drawing is a process of thought which is conducted by the hand.” she says. Spatial drawings is what she calls her three-dimensional works, which are always created for a specific location.

In this exhibition, Grzymala refers to Lothar Fischer´s text “Über das Zeichnen” (About drawing), but she uses the term in a broader sense, adding the third dimension. With her site-specific installation in the main showroom of the museum she enters into an intense dialogue with the architecture of Berschneider + Berschneider, with the proportions, the light, the atmosphere of the specific location. What is essential for Grzymala´s accessible installations is the human being as a corresponding counterpart, whose perception changes with their respective position. Although all of Grzymala´s installations are based on a clear, elaborate concept, the work in progress always turns out as a process that develops step by step, meter by meter, reacting to the special context. “As an artist wo travels a lot to create new pieces of art in most different situations, I realised rather soon that my virtual studio is mainly located in my brain, so that I always carry it with me.”

During the past 20 years the artist, who has been awarded with numerous prizes and scholarships, created more than 80 two- and three-dimensional interventions at various locations, among others at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (USA), the TAM Tokyo Art Museum (Japan), the 18^th Biennale of Sydney (Australia, 2012), the Reykjavik Art Museum (Iceland), the Kunsthalle Hamburg (Germany), and the Albertina, Vienna (Austria).

The site-specific, ephemeral installation on the ground floor of  the Museum Lothar Fischer - a museum mainly dedicated to sculpture – is not the only example of her artwork in the house. Some of Monika Grzymala´s spatial drawings in handmade Washi paper, which she makes from mulberry bast, are displayed upstairs. Together with a number of sculptures made of found objects, wire and paper clay they give a vivid impression not only of the versatility of Grzymala´s 0euvre but also of her highly sophisticated approach.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Wilhelm Loth (1920 – 1993), born in Darmstadt, is one of the most important German sculptors and college professors of the second half of the 20th century.

More than most other sculptors, he reflects upon his activities as an artist and remoulds the human image as perceived by his contemporaries. Step by step he thus finds his way to his central theme, the female body.

At the age of 17, Loth, who is deeply impressed by Käthe Kollwitz´s graphic works, contacts the 53 year-old sculptor and is strengthened in his resolve to become an artist.

In 1940 he attends Toni Stadler´s sculpting class at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt, where he gets some inspiration from sculpting in terracotta. By the end of the Nazi period he has developed his own style of figuration, which he refines in a very sensitive manner after 1945.

In 1958 Loth is offered a professorship at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste  (State Academy of Fine Art) Karlsruhe, where he teaches until 1986. In 1959 he gains a Villa Massimo scholarship and goes to Rome for a year, where he gets inspiration from the Italian baroque. Numerous solo exhibitions in Germany as well as participation in exhibitions throughout Europe, including participation in documenta III, bring success and an international reputation.

Titled "From figure to bodyscape, 1947 to 1988", the present exhibition shows early terracotta pieces, numerous drawings, works in plaster, bronze sculptures and photographs from the 70s and 80s. It depicts Loth´s journey from the figure as an abstract shape to his bodyscapes.

Whereas his early works still show complete figures, his later creations more and more concentrate on selected details of the female body. Throughout his life in his works depicting lips, breasts and womb, the sculptor is feeling his way towards the inherently feminine in these objects. He asks himself:  "What is it that I want to show? What humans look like? No. What they are like. Or how they present themselves to me: lush, deformable, flabby." Up to his death in 1993 the female figure remains Loth´s favourite theme. He sees his work as a "homage to women – their cultural image and their emancipation".

With about 50 pieces the present exhibition, which for the first time ever also presents numerous plaster sculptures to the public, is a homage to Loth´s rich and multifaceted work.

Indirectly, at the Museum Lothar Fischer Loth´s work enters into an exciting dialogue with the figurative sculptures of his friend and colleague Fischer, who was a recipient of Darmstadt´s Wilhelm-Loth-Preis.

And last not least, in 2007 and in 2015 the Museum already honoured the work of Franz Bernhard and of Robert Schad, both of them former students of Wilhelm Loth in Karlsruhe.

"To me, beauty is not just an ideal principle outside or above real life. I am looking for beauty in forms that are found in everyday life and which I consider beautiful because they are life-affirming. A beauty all women can share." Wilhelm Loth

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

It cannot be denied that the collecting and collating of works of art allows one to draw conclusions about a collector´s values and the way he sees the world. “Wir sind was wir sammeln” (We are what we collect) – a quote from Boris Groys´ essay about the rationale behind collecting (Logik der Sammlung) - serves as the title for an exhibition in which the Museum provides a representative view of one of the most important private collections in Southern Germany. Never before has this prominent collection been publicly available in such a diversity, - one more reason for the Museum to dedicate – for the very first time - almost all of its exhibition space to a special exhibition.
The sculptor Lothar Fischer, who was in contact with the art lover and showed some interest in certain pieces of his collection, would certainly have appreciated this decision.

A drawing taken from Picasso´s hugely wide-ranging work is the starting point for the special exhibition. It correlates with a big work of Renato Guttuso based on intense analysis of that exceptional Spanish painter´s work and the sources influencing it. Willi Baumeister, who spurred abstract painting, was an artist working at the opposite end of the spectrum of modern art. At the beginning of the tour through the exhibition you can see some significant works both by Willi Baumeister and Jean Fautrier.

The years following 1945 saw the further development of conceptual art, which is represented by various artists, such as Serge Poliakoff, Emil Schumacher, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Henri Michaux, Antoni Tàpies or later Walter Stöhrer. Pictures by the co-founders of the group CoBrA (1948-1951), like Asger Jorn or Karel Appel bear testimony to the revival of colour and figure. They were, in this respect, also important for SPUR, a group that Lothar Fischer co-founded in 1957.

The collector, however, was not only interested in painting, but also in sculpting, to which he attached equal value. Sculptures and drawings by Henry Moore, Marino Marini and Fritz Koenig, which are exhibited in the display cabinets of the museum, are evidence of this.

The special exhibition reaches its conclusion in a room where, next to some clay sculptures that Lothar Fisher created under the influence of pop art, you can see works of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.

Most of the exhibition space, however, is taken up by the internationally renowned Irish painter Sean Scully and the English sculptor Antony Gormley. Scully´s huge triptych Music, especially made for the collector and his wife, displays the typical construction of various combinations of vertical and horizontal colour fields overlaying one another with their tactile and sensual surface structure. Scully´s landscape format is counterbalanced by Antony Gormley´s towering metal sculpture, which deals with the human body.

Also on display in the exhibition are important works by Horst Antes, Georg Baselitz, Günter Haese, Per Kirkeby, Norbert Kricke or Niki de Saint Phalle. The latter, as the only female artist in this extraordinary collection, takes a very special position. As early as the 1960s, she had been invited by the collector for a happening in Munich. That was certainly not the only reason, but gave a decisive momentum to the art lover to establish bit by bit his outstanding collection, which led, not least, to bonds of friendship with many artists.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Every other year the Lothar & Christel Fischer Foundation in cooperation with the town of Neumarkt honours a promising contemporary artist with the Lothar Fischer Award. The award preferably goes to a sculptor, and it goes with an exhibition of the prize winner´s works at the Museum Lothar Fischer in the following year.

Stefan Rohrer, born in Göppingen in 1968, was honoured with the Lothar Fischer Award in 2015. Presently he lives and works in Stuttgart. He started his career as a stonemason, before he turned to academic education at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, where Prof. Werner Pokorny and Prof. Micha Ullmann were his teachers. Stefan Rohrer has won a number of national and international awards since then.

Inspired by Carrera tracks and toy cars from his childhood, Stefan Rohrer has chosen motorcars and technology and, more generally, time and motion to be the topic of his sculptural works. Coach bodies, motor scooters and model cars serve as the raw material of his works. Transforming or distorting these elements with extraordinary craftsmanship and arranging them anew, Stefan Rohrer creates sculptures that appear extremely dynamic and lively and elegant.

Highway Patrol 3 or Le Mans, which alludes to the spectacular French 24-hour-race, are about speed and rotation. In a way, they remind us of the abstract spatial objects of GEFLECHT, a Munich group of artists that Lothar Fischer once belonged to for a while.

With Vespa Stefan Rohrer humorously plays on the name of the Italian cult motor scooter, „wasp“. We see a red Vespa somersault, careless, almost weightless. And yet, we know how dangerous it can be.

Rohrer´s digital print Parabolika, which shows a crashing car, focuses on the danger that is closely connected with the thrill of speed.

Cars, a prominent object of Pop Art already, are still a status symbol and an icon of our consumer society, but they are also a symbol of mobility, flexibility and liberty. Even if Stefan Rohrer´s playful and daring sculptures may not appear so at first glance, they are always multilayered metaphors for danger and for fondness of travel, for yearning and for getting away as well.

Image: Marcus Rebmann/Museum Lothar Fischer

With the concentrated Wilhelm Lehmbruck exhibition, the Museum recognizes one of the most important German sculptures of Classic Modernism, whose works have also reached international critical acclaim.

Already in 1911, the year it was created, Lehmbruck’s larger-than-live The Kneeling One (title picture) was shown in the Salon d’Automne in Paris and in 1913 at the Armory Show in New York. In 1955, she was the eye catcher of the documenta I in Kassel as well as in 1964 of the documenta III. To this day, the introverted and otherworldly figure is seen as one of the main creations of the artist. The bronze bust Tilted Female Head (fig.) is creatively connected to this work of art, which is viewed as a segment. Next to various other sculptured made in different techniques such as marble, plaster, terracotta or stone, the sculptural thinking of scupture becomes clear. At all times, with regard to Lehmbruck’s works, one has to ask the question if it is a portrait like Head of an Old Lady (Mme. Germain) (fig.), if it is a self-portrait such as Youngling Bust (fig.) – or a representation of a basic idea of humankind. The sculptural work of the artist always circles around the elongated human figure, which often has an air of suffering and misery, internalization and trepidation, partially also melancholy and loneliness. His central theme in sculpture, drawing, painting and graphic remains the human.

The exhibition, consisting of just under thirty works, is dedicated in a general sense to the theme of portraits and mainly shows hos sculptures of his decisive Parisian period from 1910 to 1914, thus his famous Self-Portrait on blue paper (fig.) can also be seen. The Parisian years were significant for the German, because here he could interact with artists such as Alexander Archipenko, Constantin Brancusi or Auguste Rodin. After the outbreak of First World War, Lehmbruck returned to Germany and is recruited as a medic in military hospital in Berlin. From 1916 onward, the increasingly lugubrious sculpture lives and works in Zürich. The nomination to become a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts did not reach him before his suicide in March 1919.

Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s versatile creations are now presented in the Duisburg Lehmbruck Museum, which was built by his son Manfred Lehmbruck, a renowned museum architect, as a custom-made house for the works of his father and was opened in 1964.

For the cooperation and the appropriation of the items on loan the Lothar & Christel Fischer Foundation and the city of Neumarkt i.d.OPf. would like to thank the Foundation Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

In 1952, the advertising consultant from Ravensburg, Peter Selinka, and his wife Gudrun began to collect art. The ever-expanding collection is still considered one of the most important private collections of German Expressionism. The focal point of their passion for collecting are works from the artist group Brücke, which was founded in 1905 in Dresden, with creations of Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Otto Mueller. However, also selected paintings, drawings or graphic reproductions by Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky or Wassily Kandinsky as well as other painters from the surroundings of the Munich artists’ movement Blauer Reiter (1911 – 1914) were carefully curated together. At the end of the seventies, the collection was expanded with the paintings of the artist groups CoBrA (1948 – 1951) and SPUR (1957 – 1965); the latter also operated in Munich and saw themselves as the successors and in the tradition of the Blaue Reiter.

Since 2013, the opening year of the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, substantial parts of the collection from the Peter and Gudrun Selinka Foundation, which are also the core of the museum inventory, are now in this exhibition house. After the creations of SPUR-Cofounder Lothar Fischer were shown in Ravensburg until June 2015 and selected works from the Expressionist Collection Selinka will be on display in Neumarkt in return. Around thirty major works will be presented, which impress trough their liberal use of color, the deliberate reduction of form as well as the omission of perspective. Not the actual reproduction is image worthy, but the subjective perception. This aspiration to free color from the presentation of reality, has impressively been paid tribute to in Alexej von Jawlensky’s Spanisches Mädchen (Spanish Girl) from 1912 (title cover). The collection received a highlight of expressionist painting with this work, which Peter Selinka bought from the banker and later Vice President of the United States, Nelson Rockefeller, in the seventies.

Gerade Straße (Straight Street) or Villen am Hügel (Villas on the Hill) are works by Gabriele Münter, the former student and later partner of Wassily Kandinsky. They are evidence of the shared years in their so-called “Russenhaus” (“Russian House”) in Murnau and document Münter’s artistic achievements and inspirations from 1914. Motivically, one is dedicated to the local landscape, the immediate surroundings as well as the house and the garden. Technically, the simplifications of the forms as well as the loosening of the brush strokes and of the picture composition are striking. In initially dealing with the landscape, Kandinsky further developed his style of painting finally leading to abstract art.

The drawing Sitzende Fränzi (Sitting Fränzi) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner shows his favored model and is typical for Brücke-painter, who liked to dedicate motivically themselves to the nude in nature, but also dealt with previous taboo themes. The stroke of the drawing seems fleeting, yet the expressiveness of the line is strong and that pictured is mainly abstractly captured. Likewise, a turning towards the art of indigenous people is tangible, with which the artists dealt starting in 1909. With the founding of the group, it was not yet clear what the goal of the Brücke should be, as Erich Heckel remembers: “We knew what we wanted to part from – where we would land, was less clear.” The declared goal of all expressionist undertakings was to rebel against impressionism, naturalism, and academia, which is exemplarily expressed in this special exhibition. Works of German Expressionism, be it paintings, aquarelles or graphic prints, remain a worldwide crowd magnet, which are now shown for the first time in Neumarkt i.d.Opf. thanks to the cooperation with the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

With Robert Schad (*1953) the museum is introducing one of most internationally renowned current sculptors. His works made from massive square bar steel challenge us not only in the public space but also in numerous collections. Despite their enormous weight and materiality, they impress through a skillfully playful lightness and a distinctive dynamic.

Schad succeeds masterfully in drawing into the space with his sculptures. Through this, he takes the coldness and hardness away from the steel-body, which often resembles a line, to give it something movingly physical, sometimes even making something herbal its own. It is important for him “to find various forms of lifelines, which sometimes can be very calm and sometimes very fierce – just like life itself!”

The retrospectively arranged exhibition makes it possible to give an interesting insight into Robert Schad’s early works with circa thirty sculptures and numerous sketches. The beginning of the exhibition consists of several works, which were created at the end of his academy studies with Wilhelm Loth at the Staatliche Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (State College of Fine Arts) in Karlsruhe. They are seemingly fragile sculptural inventions made from various materials such as wood, cloth, wax, and iron. Exemplary for this is the work “Kopfähnliche” (“Headlike”) (titel image), a simple iron frame skeleton, which is covered with rudimentarily stitched cloth. Stemming from this opaque hollow body, a movable drawn line grasps out like a tentacle and makes the already graphically thought out drawing in the space tangible. More current works such as WOLTS, DWYNT, or EDDER and the three large scale works SWIFT, MERLAK, and ENFIM placed outside of the museum testify to this as much as the smaller steel sculpture from 2012 to 2015. A “Sculptre-Dance-Music-Performance”, which the artist himself initiated for Neumarkt’s Cultural Night on 10 October, additionally documents impressively the special importance the artist gives humans respectively animals as a reference point for sculpture and space.

“What is in front, what is in the back? Where is the border between sculpture and dancer? Both are partners of space in a dialog between real body movements and virtual movement of the sculpture, which seems to have been frozen in steel for the moment. Borders flow: The sculpture dances – the dancer become a part of the sculptural concept and ‘dance partner’. Gerhard Bohner asked me during our first meeting: ‘Why should I dance here? It’s already dancing!’ Dance and sculpture are equally dependent and reacting fragments of a whole. Sculpture is not part of a stage setting, but orientation, measurement, counterpart, milestone, a ray of light in the distance – a lead.” – Robert Schad, 2009

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

The spectrum of the Artist Collective WIR, which was founded in 1959 in Munich, was laid out broadly. Work titles such as Höllensturz (War in Heaven), Nachmittag eines Fauns (Afternoon of a Faun), Rubensparaphrase, Gnom, Goethe in Italien (Goethe in Italy), Rosa Kastenzauber (Rose Box Magic), Der Kannibalismus der Phantasie (The Cannibalism of Fantasy), or Supermann II (Superman II) already adumbrate that the connecting factors of artistic debates could not have been more varied.

The painters Florian Köhler (1935-2013), Heino Naujoks (*1937), and Helmut Rieger (1931-2014) initially were interested in the works of old masters such as Tintoretto, Rubens, El Greco, or Delacroix. They were fascinated not only by baroque sculptors such as Bernini, but also by Bavarian Baroque with its ceiling frescos, the illusion of space, and the interplay of light and shadow. Together they visited numerous baroque churches and monasteries like in Rott am Inn, Weltenburg, Ottobeuren, and Schäftlarn. These excursions finally led to the black-and-white film Über den barocken Raum (On the Baroque Space), which Helmut Rieger shot in 1961/62 together with the painter Reinhold Heller (1933-1993) and the sculptor Hans Matthäus Bachmayer (1940-2013), who joined the artist collective. During the same period, all WIR-members dealt with the form language of Analytic Cubism and that of the Abstract Expressionism of a Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning. As a result, through the combination of tradition and current artistic trends one was able to develop a highly individual and exciting group style. Beginning in 1964, WIR also could not exclude itself from Pop Art, which spread like wildfire. Initial doubts were quickly dispelled once it became evident that the new pictorial themes and the changed color spectrum led to an exciting artistic solution. One year later, in 1965, the group fused with the artist collective SPUR (1957 – 1965), which was also active in Munich and to which, amongst others, the sculptor and museum founder Lothar Fischer belonged to. In contrast to SPUR, whose members used methods of provocation to achieve external effects and geared towards the media as well as having a political claim relatively independent from painting, WIR worked more introverted. WIR wanted to counter “the realness of emotions against the deplorable ‘originality addiction’ of the so-called Avant Garde”, which they stated in their first manifesto from 1960 and in return did not want to be known as such. And yet, several connecting elements can be detected. For instance, both groups dedicated themselves to the expressive-figurative pictorial language and with this propagated a so-called Neue Figuration (New Figuration) against the predominant abstract art of around 1960.

Fifty years after the end of the artist collective WIR, the exhibition shows an extensive overview of their achievements with more than eighty works. This long overdue show will focus on the essential aspects of their work and effect. After all, according to Zdenek Felix, the paintings and sculpture of WIR are considered as some of the “most distinctive contributions to the renewal of contemporary art in Munich of the post-war-era.”

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

The planned retrospective exhibition honors the great Danish painter Asger Jorn (1914 – 1973). It is simultaneously also homage to his gallery owner Otto van de Loo, who celebrated his 90^th birthday in 2014. Until Jorn’s death, the two had a close friendship, which began in 1957. In the following year, the artist received in the newly founded Gallery van de Loo in Munich his first single presentation in Germany.

Many important works, which are now found in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, or in museums in Oslo, Amsterdam, and also Munich amongst others, were created during painting sojourns with the family van de Loo. Several of these paintings have gone as a generous donation from van de Loo to the National Gallery of State Museums of Berlin in 1990 and in 2000 to the Kunsthalle Emden, which had to build an extra annex to accommodate the collection.

Next to selected canvases of this major donation, the exhibition will also display important drawings, aquarelles, and sculptures from 1945 to 1972. All works bring not just Jorn’s artistic development to mind, but beyond that they stand in direct connection to his art dealer and collector.

The multifaceted oeuvre of Asger Jorn unfurls itself between figuration and abstraction and is evidence of impressive adventurousness in dealing with different techniques. In 1936, Jorn traveled to Paris for the first time, became a student of Fernand Léger, and was cofounder of the internationally operating artists’ collective CoBra in 1948, whose name derives from the beginning letters of the cities Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. In the group the members tried to implement their artistic approaches, which developed during the war years, and with this wanted to contribute to the construction of a new society. The carefree desire of pictorial world dominated by confidence and figuration led to a new fascinating pictorial language. Throughout his life, Jorn achieved to develop his own style, which was shaped through lively chromaticity and dynamics, in different media. As a motive he not only dealt with Nordic myths, but also with current events.

Moreover, his activities in publishing had an effect on his generation and young colleagues. The Munich artist collective SPUR, to which Lothar Fischer (1933 – 2004) belonged, also met the Dane in 1958 and since then had been in close artistic and personal contact with him. Asger Jorn still doubtlessly counts as one of the most influential and most varied European artists of the twentieth century.

Art is the most important instrument, to agitate public excitement, create emotional suspense, and at the same time set the hidden energy inherent to humans free. Tolerance is the only intolerable thing in the artistic field. – Asger Jorn in his book “Pour la forme” Paris 1958

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Felix Schramm, now living in Düsseldorf (born 1970 in Hamburg), received the remunerated Lothar Fischer Award and may now present his artistic accomplishments in a special exhibition. Schramm started studying sculpture in 1991 at the Accademia di Bella Arti di Firenze in Florenz and subsequently under Jannis Kounellis at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. After his studies ended, he received a DAAD Scholarship, which allowed him a work stay in Tokyo. In 2008, he went to Rome as a Villa Massimo Scholarship recipient. This honor was also given to Lothar Fischer in 1961. After individual exhibitions amongst others in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2009), in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007), and in the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2006) he gains international renown.
Felix Schramm became known with his space encompassing installations, which belong to the group of works spatial intersections. The viewer is confronted with large, plastically constructed wall apertures mainly out of fragmented and broken plaster carton plates, which create positive and negative volume. These insertions, which seem to perforate the outside walls and develop themselves from one room to the next, are understood by Schramm to be a deliberate set on the wall in the space. The use of color and traces, which are drawn on the plain, is an intentionally chosen and developed new association area (landscapes, geological explorations, organic or also abstract aspects etc.).
Parallel to these complex and technically very elaborate, site-specific installations, which he explores spatially for himself beforehand in exhibition models, his works on paper are created. These are based mainly on photographs of his own works. The photographic pictures are torn, processed, and then put back together again in several layers like a collage. Schramm himself describes this process as adding and subtracting of areas. He calls the series Multilayer, to which also the works Accumulated 7 and Accumulated 8 belong. Together with Multilayer 133 (title page) they give a good glimpse of Schramm’s work method and of his sculptural thinking.
In the Museum Lothar Fischer, he will show his large, space encompassing installation Accumulator 5, which sounds out the area of conflict between construction and deconstruction. When the viewer walks around these sculptural-architectural objects made out of walls, passages, and vistas – similar to a “room in the room” – the complexity of the works will become evident to him/her for the first time. Like many artists of his generation, who work with installations, Schramm thinks about the relationship between sculpture, architecture, surrounding, and viewer. He is also interested in the references between individual form-giving, sometimes overlying elements as well as in the spatial relation between inside and outside, up and down, or horizontal and vertical. For his space installations, which are merged out of various materials and created through layering, conventional hardware store materials such as sheetrocks, glass panes, or mesh constructions are turned into a work of art.
Also in his work Ohne Titel (Untitled) 2013, forms and sculptures are brought into a new context. Moreover, body moldings out of polyurethane can be understood as altercations with the human body, for instance. These moldings used in the space sculptures also testify for the organic character of the creating of the sculptor, whose works move willfully between abstraction and figuration. Interestingly, such interplay can also be detected in the œuvre of Lothar Fischer.

We would like to thank the members of the Recommendations Panel of the Lothar Fischer Award 2013: Martin Wöhrl, Lothar Fischer Awardee 2011; Ellen Seifermann, Kunsthalle Nuremberg; Dr. Erich Schneider, Kunsthalle Schweinfurt; Dr. Frank Schmidt, Kunsthalle Emden; Dieter Brunner, Städtische Museen Heilbronn, and Azade Köker, artist and professor at the TU Braunschweig.
We would also like to thank the members of the Decision Panel, consisting of Members the Board of Directors and Curator Members of the Lothar & Christel Fischer Foundation.
Chairman of the Award Jury was Florian Sundheimer.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

The painter Heimrad Prem (1934-1978) and the sculptor Lothar Fischer (1933-2004) were connected through a personal and an artistic friendship. This intense exchange of the two artists will now be broached and honored in an exemplary manner with the thirtieth special exhibition on the occasion of the Tenth Anniversary of the Museum. It will be shown that the two graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and cofounders of the legendary artists’s collectives SPUR (1957-1965), SPUR WIR, and GEFLECHT not only left paintings and sculptures, but also a rich œuvre of drawings and aquarelles. Initially, they worked artistically on the crossing point between the Informel and Neuer Figuration [New Figuration], then the two documenta-participants increasingly developed their own pictoral language in 1964, which is seen as one of the most important witnesses of the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies. As SPUR-members they made considerable contributions to the artistic atmosphere of departure of the time with their distribution of flyers, manifestos, and their own magazine. Also, the intense engagement with Pop Art brought new and exciting sculptural solutions which, for the first time in 1967, were introduced to a broader audience in a collective exhibition in the Galerie van de Loo, Munich, and the Galerie Hella Nebelung, Düsseldorf. While Prem showed his three dimensional Polsterbilder [Cushion Pictures], Fischer exhibited his lacquered, colored tube – and flow forms, his so called Emanationen [Emanations]. Works such as Fischer’s Nächtliches Bad [Nightly Bath] from 1966 or Prem’s Stillleben (Bad) [Still Life (Bath)], 1967, are evidence of explicit Pop Art influences of a Tom Wesselmann or Claes Oldenburg.
Furthermore, Prem discovered the imagery of the hippie movement, such as eroticism, and began to paint under the influence of drugs during the time of the generation of 1968. Outbreaks between euphoria and despair ended in 1971 with an attempted suicide. In the 1970s, after a reflexive phase and several trips, he experienced important new impulses. In 1974, the large formatted canvas Meine kleine Welt (Vor mir) [My small World (Before me)] was created, which confronted him with his occupation as a painter. Numerous main works of Fischer’s Hüllenphase [Wrap Phase], which fascinated the artist friend Prem, can be dated back to the same time. For Fischer, the colleague was an “exceptionally gifted painter”, an existential border crosser, who combined life and art extremely closely.
Due to its ten year existence, the Museum has extensively sorted through its Fischer- as well as Prem-inventory. These highlights of the collection will now be shown in a presentation dedicated to the artists’ friendship, because the Lothar & Christel Fischer Foundation possess the worldwide largest and broadest ranged collection of these two artists. The exhibition will show approximately seventy works of the museum, but also important items on loan; such as the SPUR-Schiff [SPUR-Ship] from 1964, which was sculpted by Fischer and colored by Prem, and Prem’s monumental work Nur der Kampf stärkt mich [Only the battle makes me stronger], which he originally created for a dining room in the Milan Palazzo of Count Marinotti, for which Fischer also designed bronze heating grids. This show reflects, for the first time ever, the graphic works of both artists; it stretches over two stories and documents their œuvre from their first encounter in 1953 to Prem’s suicide in 1978. The presentation is completed through a room with documents from the Deutsche Kunst Archiv Nürnberg [German Art Archive Nuremberg], where Fischer’s written estate is situated. Photos, letters, invitation cards, and posters are further witnesses of this friendship.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

The exhibition of the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) is a retrospective dedicated to his sketches, graphic, and sculptural work. Amongst others, selected sculptures in alabaster, steel, and terracotta will be shown, which masterfully exemplify the multifaceted imagery and the creative logic of the exceptional artist. It is also interesting to see by means of this special exhibition in the benefactor museum of the declared clay sculptor Lothar Fischer, how differently the sculptors Chillida and Fischer dealt with the raw material clay.

For the support of this exhibition we would like to thank the Museo Chillida in Zabalaga-Leku and the National Graphic Arts Collection Munich.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

On the occasion of her fiftieth birthday, the museum will show the extensive graphic and sculptural works of the artist, who now lives in Berlin. Beginning in 1991, she studied under Micha Ullmann amongst others at the Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart (State Academy of Fine Arts) and completed her studies with Lothar Fischer at the University of Arts Berlin as master student.

Even today, her works show an intense occupation with the theme figure, human body, the wrapper as a sculptural form, yet her work is becoming increasingly abstract and closed.

The favored material of Kristina Redeker-Warter is steel, often bringing it into connection with textile materials, which again gives the works an unusual tension.

Image: Stefan Warter

The Austrian Fritz Wotruba, who throughout his life dedicated his artistic expression to the human form, is still considered one of the most important pioneers of twentieth century European sculpting. Not only is the work of Wotruba from figurativeness to abstract architectural sculptures documented in the exhibition of over thirty pieces, but his graphic works are also introduced. The focus of the presentation are numerous bronze figures and two stone figures, which are in keeping with Lothar Fischer’s concept of “Basic Human Form: Stand – Sit – Lie”.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Martin Wöhrl ist bekannt für seine großformatigen, ortsspezifischen Installationen aus gebrauchten Türblättern, Pressspanresten oder Fundstücken, die er in einen neuen Zusammenhang arrangiert. Dabei entstehen Kunstwerke mit einer lebendigen Alltagsästhetik.
Parallel zu seinen raumbezogenen Arbeiten schafft er in den letzten Jahren auch eine Reihe eigenständiger Werke. Allen liegt ein lustvoller Einsatz von Material, aber auch eine gekonnt spielerische Umsetzung von Bezügen und Zitaten zu Grunde. Wöhrl geht es nie nur um formale plastische Ausformungen, sondern es findet gleichsam eine inhaltliche Auseinandersetzung mit kulturgeschichtlichen und soziologischen Aspekten statt. Mit dem zunächst wohl eher irritierenden Ausstellungstitel "Modern Art" will der Künstler durch verschiedene Plastiken humorvoll auf diesen heute so vielschichtigen Begriff anspielen. Gleichzeitig schafft er hier seinen eigenen musealen Skulpturenpark in offenem Dialog zu den Arbeiten von Lothar Fischer.

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Tom Fährmann

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

HENNING KÜRSCHNER Paintings
POMONA ZIPSER Sculptures

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

Image: Andreas Pauly/Museum Lothar Fischer

The special exhibition not only pays tribute to the work of the great expressionist sculptor in the wake of his 150th birthday, but also presents the Hamburg Ernst Barlach Haus - Hermann F. Reemtsma Foundation - with its excellent collection in southern Germany. Born in Wedel in Holstein in 1870, the multi-talented Ernst Barlach ranks among the most important sculptors, draughtsmen and writers of the 20th century, not least in an international context. Even before his death in Rostock in 1938, he was exposed to National Socialist defamation as a "degenerate" artist.

The focus of his work is the human being, his or her conditions of life and the conception of humanity being associated with them. Thus, it is also Barlach's concern to capture the human figure, which he depicts in a reduced external form, in its inner feelings. He is interested, as he himself puts it, in "the sinister enigma of the human being". This is shown not only by his well-known bronzes The Berserker, The Avenger, Freezing Girl, Veiled Beggar Woman or The Singing Man, but also by the famous Frieze of Listeners (1930 to 1935). The artist was working on this group of figures and the associated drawings in 1934, when the Hamburg factory owner Hermann F. Reemtsma visited him for the first time in his studio in Güstrow. To his great delight, Ernst Barlach, who presumably portrayed himself in the figure of The Wanderer, was commissioned by Hermann F. Reemtsma at that time to complete the ensemble of figures. Barlach later wrote: "To be allowed to work on this composition pushed me through time and lifted me above its muddy grounds."

The Frieze of Listeners with its nine wooden sculptures is the centrepiece of the presentation at the Neumarkt Museum and thus for the first time in an exciting dialogue with Lothar Fischer's eight white Enigma Variations from 1996/97 made of polystyrene and plaster. Both Barlach's and Fischer's larger-than-life series of figures are equally impressive and enigmatic. They make the special show with its total of 28 works a very particular experience that cannot be conveyed in this form in any other museum.

All works are on loan from the Ernst Barlach Haus - Hermann F. Reemtsma Foundation, Hamburg. For the cooperation project, our special thanks go to Bernhard Reemtsma, Chairman of the Board, and Dr Karsten Müller, Director of the Museum.

Image: Andreas Pauly / Museum Lothar Fischer

Foto: Andreas Pauly / Museum Lothar Fischer