Evolving in Germany around the same time as Nouveau Réalisme was a new kind of painting that once again embraced figuration. The abstract painting of Art Informel had turned its back on the illusionistic representation of figure and space, thus avoiding any possible ideological monopoly of the kind associated with Nazi art or with the Socialist Realism of post-war Eastern Europe. Indeed, the illusionistic representation of the human figure was generally held in suspicion. By the 1960s, however, the situation had changed. For the exponents of New Figuration it was abstract art that was now suspected of having glossed over the crimes of the Nazis, washing away its own guilt through abstraction and colluding with the affluent society that had established itself during the post-war reconstruction of Germany in the 1950s and now refused to acknowledge what had happened under Nazi tyranny.
Long before the student uprisings of 1968, the painters of New Figuration had sought to expose the mendacity of painting and, by the same token, that of society. The reality reflected in their paintings was also the reality of society. The “Capitalist Realism” of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke formulated this reality in conceptual terms, while such artists as Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz were more expressive and provocative.
The Pandemonium Manifesto published by Baselitz together with Eugen Schönebeck shows us how tortured figures squirm their way out of the abstract lines of Art Informel. In Baselitz's “Hero” paintings, monumental maimed and wounded soldiers wander across landscapes of ruins. Other paintings, such as “Acker” (“Field”), are strewn with lumps of human flesh. From the end of the 1960s Baselitz turned his paintings upside down, his intention being to separate content from form, figure from ground within the painting. The 1990s saw a further fundamental change in style. His powerfully wrought dark, earthy colours yielded to thin, light, translucent watercolour-like oil colours. The figure-ground relationship had now dissolved completely, such that the figures in his paintings seemed to float in the picture space or in the picture plane. Retaining this style in his “Remix” series, Baselitz redid the motifs from his early years. Typical examples are the large-format colour woodcuts to be shown in the forthcoming exhibition.
Markus Lüpertz's provocative answer to abstraction at the beginning of the 1960s was his “Mickey Mouse” series, in which grotesque figures evolved from abstract forms reminiscent of the works of Willem de Kooning. His “dithyrambic” paintings of the 1970s depicted empty soldiers' uniforms and the German steel helmet from the Second World War, the latter also appearing in his recent “Arcadia” series – likewise to be shown in the forthcoming exhibition – alongside sculptures of classical antiquity. While the helmet evokes the Latin phrase “Et in arcadia ego” – “And I am in Arcadia” – it is not clear whether it is the horror of war or the fear of death that is being sublimated in these idyllic landscapes of Arcadia.
The exponents of New Figuration did not become famous, nor did they receive much attention from art critics, until the “painting boom” at the beginning of the 1980s, which had been triggered by the German Neo-Expressionists, also known as “Neue Wilden”. The Neo-Expressionists were concentrated on the three centres of Hamburg, Cologne and Berlin. The movement in Hamburg had a close affinity to political activism. Largely comprising students of Sigmar Polke, it took a more intellectual, reflective approach to painting, while the movement in Berlin was more expressive and spontaneous. In choosing painting as their medium of expression, both movements had made a definite stand against the meanwhile established movement of Concept Art, which in the academies of that period had been calling the tune and making painting taboo. Concept Art, too, had originally sought to call in question the reality of art and society. But in the meantime objects of Concept Art had become coveted collectors' items and, by the same token, a part of the system and the conventions against which they had originally been aimed. For the Neo-Expressionists, swamped in a mélange of resignation, provocation and the wish for a direct strategy against the intellectualism of Concept Art, painting was the answer. But while the paintings of the Neo-Expressionists represented a complete break with the now conventional movement of Concept Art, contemporary critics saw this return to painting as a step backwards rather than a step forwards.
Thus the Neo-Expressionists stood on the threshold between the progressive ideas behind modernism and the “anything goes” approach of post-modernism. The resumption of what had already been, namely figurative, expressive painting, represented a fundamental break with modernism. Moreover, this break was the very last one that could still cause a scandal. It could not now be repeated with the same provocative effect. Artists were henceforth completely free to mix the styles and genres of all periods just as they wished without fear of prior rejection by art critics or exclusion from academies. Indeed, it was thanks to the Neo-Expressionists that the limiting conditions of art had been transcended and a new post-modern epoch could begin.
Even if the Neo-Expressionists did not take up painting for painting's sake but rather out of protest against the established movement of Concept Art (Salomé, for example, had been an action artist, among other things, before he took up painting), they quickly recognized the advantages of the medium, which by comparison with installations, films and other such media could be realized – and also viewed – directly and immediately. Thus the Neo-Expressionists were for the most part amateurs when it came to painting and, as such, were altogether in keeping with the prevailing zeitgeist. Parallels may be drawn with the struggle against the conventions of the music industry. Here it had become possible for everyone, through low-cost recordings, and especially with the aid of cassettes, to tape and distribute their own music. Like the rapidly executed paintings of the Neo-Expressionists, the results were rough and ready. They were also targeted against the virtuoso exponents of guitar rock who by then were also fully paid-up members of the established culture industry. The new possibilities of making music manifested themselves above all in the rapid spread of the Punk movement, with which the Neo-Expressionists shared the aversion to the system and to the established alternative of the Hippie movement and the sixty-eighters. Punk and Neo-Expressionism felt the same hopelessness, and their yearnings for an alternative were virtually identical. Sheer cynicism prevailed, and this fuelled the utmost aggression and provocation both in the music of the Punk movement and in the paintings of the Neo-Expressionists. At the same time, the fastness and immediacy of Neo-Expressionist painting met the enormous demand, not to say hunger, for paintings at the beginning of the 1980s, this being the first of the many booms that were to follow right up until the present day.
The point of contact between music and art was the Club SO35 in the Kreuzberg quarter of Berlin, which Martin Kippenberger, who actually belonged to the Hamburg faction, managed for a time. The club was also frequented by the Berliners Salomé, Middendorf, Fetting and Zimmer from the Galerie am Moritzplatz just around the corner. The atmosphere of the club has been captured by these artists in a number of their paintings, for their chosen medium also served them as a means of expressing and shaping their own awareness of life. Thus painting was no longer autonomous, no longer painting for its own sake. The naked male bodies, the strobe-lit concerts and the paintings of the Berlin Wall are the outcome of the gay activism, sexually charged action art and lifestyles of Salomé, Fetting and Middendorf. It is in this context that the Berlin artists in particular developed a new kind of subjectivity: the ideal of the executive employer ambitiously striving for status and expressing this status through status symbols had become a thing of the past by 1980. His place had now been taken by the creative subject striving for individual fulfilment and embracing the ideals of the counter-movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the creativity of the artist and the entrepreneur. Interestingly, this ideal subject corresponds to that of neo-liberalism, which had begun to make its mark around the same time.
It was not long before the dilettantism of the Neo-Expressionists had begun to develop into a kind of professionalism – as early as 1982 – and the movement as a group phenomenon eventually broke up. Many of its exponents now worked in the medium of painting seriously and for its own sake, Albert Oehlen being the best-known example. It is against this background that the forthcoming exhibition will be showing Salomé's “Water Lily” paintings, in which figures swim through patches of colour. They are – quite literally – immersed in the painting and its colours, these being at once image and material. Like Baselitz much later, Salomé here analyses painting in terms of the relationship of figure and ground.
Kai Schupke

Opening : Saturday, 21st May 2016, 2.00 pm – 6.00 pm

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