The artist Galli was born in Saarland in 1944. After completing her basic apprenticeship at the Werkkunstschule in Saarbrücken with Oscar Holweck, she moved to Berlin in 1969 where she studied under and later became the master student of the Dutch artist and graphic designer Martin Engelmann, who was influenced by the Cobra Group. Galli’s arrival to Berlin aligned with the '68 uprisings in German in which political provocation, awakening, and upheaval expanded beyond the university. At the beginning of the 1980s, the Neuen Wilden movement developed in Germany and Austria, a group mainly dominated by men, to which Galli likes to be assigned, but which she consciously distanced herself from in her painting.

The exhibition "See How You Get On" curated by Annabell Burger included about fifty works created between 1985 and 2015. Among them were rarely shown artists' books and drawings, as well as paintings from Galli's most productive years.

In cooperation with Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg

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Galli, Langes Bild, 1985-1987 © Galli

Guaymallén is a municipality in the province of Mendoza in Argentina. It was here that La Chola Poblete, Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” 2023, was born as Mauricio Poblete in 1989. She grew up here, in her own words, “surrounded by landscapes of olive trees and vineyards, with breathtaking autumn days and the ever-present, Andes mountain range.” The exhibition titled Guaymallén is a tribute to her roots, to the time when she was growing up as a non-binary, indigenous teenager, a time when La Chola began to draw, explore art and pop culture, and experiment with her queer identity.

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La Chola Poblete, 2023 © La Chola Poblete, Photo: Tomas Wurschmidt

“The first step in liquidating a people … is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture,its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.“
– Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980

Societies require continuity and connection with the past to preserve social unity and cohesion and people need to know where they come from to be able to adjust to the circumstances of the present and challenges of the future. One of the most insidious consequences of the slave trade and European colonialism in Africa was the devaluing and dismantling of precolonial histories and cultures. The African artifacts in Western museums are symbols of the cultures that were robbed of their people and material heritage, ruthlessly subjugated, or gradually hollowed out and disassembled.

Restitution is only one step in a long journey toward the reconstruction of memory and cultural self-reinvention. Artists are taking other steps, mining family archives, highlighting individual stories, recuperating lesser-known histories, imagining different power dynamics, and constructing alternative narratives.

Curated by Kerryn Greenberg, Independent Curator and Co-Director New Curators

_{The Struggle of Memory Part 1: 19.4. – 18.9.2023 | The Struggle of Memory Part 2: 6.10.2023 – 1.4.2024}

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Jo Ractliffe, Details of Tiled Murals at the Fortaleza De São Miguel, depicting Portuguese Explorations in Africa 6, from the series 'Terreno Ocupado', 2007 © Jo Ractliffe. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town / Johannesburg/ Amsterdam

The exhibition traces the various stages of the gallery owner’s life as reflected in art. Works from different periods of origin are juxtaposed to create exciting dialogues, enabling conclusions to be drawn about existential themes of humankind.

Since 1956, all aspects of Rudolf Zwirner’s life have been closely linked with art, the development of which he decisively shaped in the second half of the twentieth century up to the present day: professionally as a gallery owner, secretary general of documenta II, cofounder of the world’s first art fair, and curator, but also privately in intensive exchange with artists. Life in Pictures. A Portrait of Seeing for Rudolf Zwirner, shown on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, makes a plea that art as an essential part of the human condition. The around eighty works in the exhibition, which come from museums, private collections, as well as the Deutsche Bank Collection, which owes important acquisitions to the Zwirner gallery, paint an artistic portrait of this impressive, multi-faceted man. At the same time, however, they stand for the constants, ruptures, and developments in art and the art trade since the postwar period, which Zwirner decisively influenced and shaped. Rudolf Zwirner was already associated with most of the artists represented in the show in the early stages of their careers and participated in their later successes.

Featuring Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Serge Charchoune, Max Ernst, Dan Flavin, David Hockney, Martha Jungwirth, Konrad Klapheck, Astrid Klein, Maria Lassnig, Agnes Martin, Olaf Metzel, Henri Michaux, Piet Mondrian, Blinky Palermo, Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and others.

The PalaisPopulaire is pleased to be hosting an exhibition devoted to Isaac Julien, an award-winning British artist and filmmaker known for his impressive lyrical films and video installations. Five years after the profound global financial crisis, Julien presented the film Playtime in 2013. In it, he addresses a fundamental question: how can capital be visualized?
On view in Germany for the first time, Playtime is more topical than ever. It is about networking, interconnectedness, and the influence that capital, which eludes any explicit possibility of representation, has on all political, social and societal spheres and thus on the lives of almost everyone on the planet.

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 Installation view PalaisPopulaire "Isaac Julien: PLAYTIME" © Isaac Julien, Courtesy: Wemhöner Collection, Photo: Mathias Schormann

Helga de Alvear has not only been arguably Spain's most important gallery owner for decades, but also one of the country's most important collectors and promoters of Spanish contemporary art. On the occasion of Spain's invitation as this year's guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the PalaisPopulaire, in cooperation with the Museo Helga de Alvear and the Embassy of Spain, presents the exhibition ESCRIBIR TODOS SUS NOMBRES.

Compiled by curator Lola Hinojosa, Head of Performing Arts and Intermedia Collection at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the show from the collection of the Museo Helga de Alvear documents an exciting but little-known chapter of contemporary Spanish art. It brings together women artists who, influenced by Constructivist traditions, Minimal Art, as well as conceptual and performance art, developed a formal language that was as reduced as it was associative. Many of the older artists, including Elena Asins or Aurèlia Muñoz, were closely associated with experimental groups that emerged in Spain during the last decades of the Franco dictatorship. The title ESCRIBIR TODOS SUS NOMBRES (To write down all their names) is taken from a 2001 work by artist Dora García. The show refers not only to the urgently needed visibility of women artists, but also to the very specific connection to poetry, linguistics, music, and architecture that links the different generations featured in this exhibition.

In cooperation with Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Helga de Alvear, Cáceres, and support by the Spanish Embassy and the Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID).

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Soledad Sevilla, Los días con Pessoa, 2021 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022, Photo: Mathias Schormann

Born in Shanghai, LuYang is one of the most important contemporary Asian artists and this year’s Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year” 2022. The exhibition DOKU Experience Center focuses entirely on a virtual reincarnation called Dokusho Dokushi, or DOKU for short. The gender-neutral avatar is a hyperrealistic figure whose countenance is modeled on LuYang’s face. All facial expressions and movement patterns are performed by dancers and then recorded using motion capture technology, a process that generates 3D models on this basis for video games, for example.

As in a futuristic research laboratory, all six digital versions of DOKU can be experienced in the exhibition. In addition to the first narrative video DOKU the Self, LuYang’s music video DOKU the Matrix, conceived expressly for the show, and the new series Bardo #1, which shows the avatar with its respective attributes in round mandala compositions, are presented.

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All artworks © LuYang, courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin, Photo: Mathias Schormann

Opera, whose name derives from the Italian word for “work,” is a genre in constant flux. Based on a wide and significant selection of the MAXXI Museum’s Collection, the show is devoted to a quintessentially Italian subject while at the same time exploring the fascination and potential of opera as a theatrical Gesamtkunstwerk from the perspective of global visual arts. The artists featured deal with physical expression, masking, staging, performativity, experiences of space, and sound. Among them are important protagonists of Italian contemporary art such as Monica Bonvicini, Vanessa Beecroft, Enzo Cucchi, and Liliana Moro, as well as international artists such as William Kentridge, Philippe Rahm, Susan Philipsz, and Kara Walker. Three international artists will be commissioned to create new site-specific productions expressly for the show.

Opera Opera. Allegro ma non troppo is a collaboration between the PalaisPopulaire and the MAXXI, Rome

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Michelangelo Pistoletto, Quadro di fili elettrici, 1967, © Michelangelo Pistoletto, Image Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI, Photo: Patrizia Tocci

On view in the Forum, as an interlude is the show Intermezzo: Play and the In-between in Illustration and Design after Bruno Munari. With Marte Guixé, Silvia Maccariello, and Carlo Stanga.

Intermezzo is a collaboration between the PalaisPopulaire, mu.se, RAUM Italic, and Corraini Edizioni.

About a decade ago, Deutsche Bank initiated the “Artist of the Year” program. On the occasion of its 10th anniversary it is now for the first time awarding three artists at the same time: Maxwell Alexandre (Brazil), Conny Maier (Germany), and Zhang Xu Zhan (Taiwan).

What all three have in common is that they came to contemporary art via unusual paths and bring very specific life experiences and cultural influences with them.

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Maxwell Alexandre, Forbes Under 30, 2020 © A Gentil Carioca - Maxwell Alexandre; Conny Maier, Dominieren, 2021 © Conny Maier. Courtesy of König Galerie; Zhang Xu Zhan, Animal Story Series - A Flowing Piece of Shard, 2021 © Zhang Xu Zhan, courtesy of the artist and Project Fulfill Art Space

Aspects of contemporary abstract art are the focus of the exhibition showcasing works from the Deutsche Bank Collection. On display are drawings, photographs and, for the first time, significant paintings and prints from 1959 to 2021.

The title refers to the artists’ diverse “ways” of creating non-representational visual worlds and to the equally varied ways that viewers can perceive and interpret them individually.

Ways of Seeing Abstraction is globally conceived with a selection of rather unknown or rarely shown works by internationally renowned artists such as Gerhard Richter and Tadaaki Kuwayama, and a number of new discoveries and rediscoveries including the positions of Rana Begum, Jennie C. Jones, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Wilhelm Müller.

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_{Rana Begum, WP412, WP410, WP411, 2020 © Rana Begum. Photo: Mathias Schorrmann}

“Hirnsturm,” or “brain storm,” could be a flood of inner images that shoots through one’s head in extreme states. The exhibition of Berlin artist Marc Brandenburg, translates this inundation into a spatial experience. The show’s main hall, which is bathed in black light, shows a swirl of drawings inverted into the negative.

Brandenburg has been capturing everyday motifs on strolls through cities like Berlin, London, and Barcelona. The images, which he first photographs, then edits on the computer, and then draws freehand, often show friends and acquaintances from the Berlin scene. Brandenburg takes the perspective of a German, gay “person of color” in his work, examining his immediate surroundings and documenting a life that takes place primarily in a white context.

Read more in ArtMag.

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^{Installationview "Marc Brandenburg – Hirnsturm II" © Marc Brandenburg, Photo: Mathias Schormann}

In the early 1960s the painter K.H. Hödicke is one of the leaders of a small group of young intellectual rebels that revolutionize painting. German postwar art had previously sought to catch up with international abstract tendencies when this new group, rejecting all doctrine, countered with a revival of figurative painting, which had been declared obsolete.

In 1957, Hödicke moved and began studying painting with Fred Thieler at Berlin Hochschule für Bildende Künste in 1959. His straight painting, in turn, would influence later artists who in the 1980s became known as the Neue Wilde (New Wild Ones).

With drawings, paintings, and sculptures, this retrospective gives a comprehensive overview of Hödicke’s inexhaustible oeuvre.

_{Installation view "K.H. Hödicke" © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020, Photo: Mathias Schormann}

The exhibition Time Present with works from the Deutsche Bank Collection, is devoted to international photography from the 1970s to the present. The show examines how artists deal with time and the basic questions of photography: What different levels of reality and time does a photograph capture? Does it actually depict a certain moment? Is what is seen in a photograph present or past, reality or imagination?

The spectrum of the exhibition ranges from “classics” of contemporary German photography, including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, and Candida Höfer, to young photographic art from Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and China, which today is helping to shape the collection.

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_{Mathilde ter Heijne, Unknown Woman, #21, 2013; Unknown Woman, #28, 2013 © Mathilde ter Heijne, Photo: Mathias Schormann}

The PalaisPopulaire honors with Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Projects 1963–2021 what is probably the most popular contemporary artist couple and provides insights into their creative process spanning almost four decades.

The works on view, drawn from the Ingrid and Thomas Jochheim Collection, document the creative process of the duo’s work. At the center of the show is a monumental artwork that connects Christo and Jeanne-Claude with the German capital: the spectacular veiling of the Reichstag. As always with their ambitious projects, the preparations for that project took decades, and they were accompanied by political debates.

The exhibition shows designs for Store Fronts, replicated fronts of shops covered with cloth (1965). and ends with preliminary works for the final project of the exceptional artist duo— the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

_{Installationsansicht "Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Projects 1963–2021" © Ingrid & Thomas Jochheim Collection, Photo: Mathias Schormann}

This will have been another happy day! – with these words Austrian artist Xenia Hausner makes a promise that anticipates the future and thereby conveys an optimistic present, setting in motion the apparatus of human dreams and hopes.

In her large-format paintings, stage design sketches, objects, associative material, and model parts as well as figurines by Arthur Arbesser, Hausner links up to her stage design for the new production of Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier staged by André Heller at the Berliner Staatsoper.

The show is the first cooperation between Staatsoper Unter den Linden and the PalaisPopulaire.

Xenia Hausner, On fire, 2019 © Xenia Hausner. Courtesy Private Collection, Foto: Mathias Schormann

Bauhaus artists Walter Gropius and Oskar Schlemmer dreamed of a “total theater” a hundred years ago—a place where art and technology fuse into new experiences, where the boundaries between stage and auditorium dissolve.

Das Totale Tanz Theater, a virtual reality production, approaches this vision. The installation, conceived and realized under the auspices of the Interactive Media Foundation, transports guests to a 400-meter-high virtual reality dome. With VR glasses, visitors become actors in a spectacular work of art that explores the relationship between humans and machines in the digital age.

_{Dancing machine © Artifical Rome / Interactive Media Foundation}

Bauhaus artists Walter Gropius and Oskar Schlemmer dreamed of a “total theater” a hundred years ago—a place where art and technology fuse into new experiences, where the boundaries between stage and auditorium dissolve.

Das Totale Tanz Theater, a virtual reality production, approaches this vision. The installation, conceived and realized under the auspices of the Interactive Media Foundation, transports guests to a 400-meter-high virtual reality dome. With VR glasses, visitors become actors in a spectacular work of art that explores the relationship between humans and machines in the digital age.

Video   Catalogue

installation view "Caline Aoun: seeing is believing" © Caline Aoun, Photo: Mathias Schormann

It was the climax of the hippie movement: In 1967 hundreds of thousands flocked to San Francisco to celebrate the Summer of Love. It was a time of profound changes, not only in society, but also in art, fashion, and music. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, along with love and peace, participation became the watchword of an entire generation.

summer of love brings to life these culturally and politically important years and builds a bridge to our time. The show, conceived by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, presents over 150 objects and documents from that legendary summer: psychedelic art, iconic rock posters, Flower Power fashion, rare photographs, light shows, and record covers.

_{Images from left to right: Lee Conklin, Canned Heat, Gordon Lightfoot, Cold Blood, October 3-5, Fillmore West, 1968; Victor Moscoso, “Swirley,” Doors, Miller Blues Band, Haji Baba, April 14 & 15, Avalon Ballroom, 1967; Wes Wilson, Rorschach Test, Blues Project, It's a Beautiful Day, Nazz-Are Blues Band, April 5 - 7, Avalon Ballroom, 1968; Larry Stark, Rorschach Test II, Frumius Bandersnatch, Clear Light, Buddy Guy, June 14 - 16 Ballroom, 1968. Image Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Photo installation view © Mathias Schormann}

Comprising around seventy-five masterpieces from Tate’s Collection, Objects of Wonder shows how British artists have revolutionized contemporary sculpture since the middle of the twentieth century. The spectrum ranges from icons of postwar modernism like Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, to stars of the Young British Artist generation, including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, who is represented with a provocative neon sculpture.

The show examines important modern and contemporary art movements illustrating, for example, how everyday objects are transformed. Through distortion, recombination, and dramatic staging they become Objects of Wonder that put things that were forgotten or only fleetingly perceived in a completely new light.

Catalogue

_{From left to right: Michael Bolus, 7th Sculpture, 1965 © The Estate of Michael Bolus; David Annesley, Swing Low, 1964 © David Annesley. Photo installation view: Mathias Schormann}

The World on Paper is the opening exhibition of the PalaisPopulaire. Encompassing some 300 highlights and newly discovered works from the Deutsche Bank Collection, the exhibition shows the fascination paper has exerted on artists since postwar Modernism and how this material has opened up new possibilities in the digital age.

The exhibition offers new insights into the diversity, history, and international orientation of these extraordinary holdings. At the same time, it illustrates the global orientation of the Deutsche Bank Collection. Altogether, the selection encompasses more than 130 artists, among them Doug Aitken, Joseph Beuys, Ellen Gallagher, Sigmar Polke, Dieter Roth, and Atsuko Tanaka. For art after 1945, the Deutsche Bank Collection is one of the world’s most important collections focusing on paper.

_{From left to right: Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1977 © Estate of Joan Mitchell; Helen Marten, Untitled, 2015 © Helen Marten, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. Shirazeh Houshiary, Untitled, 1989 © Shirazeh Houshiary, Photo: Mathias Schormann}