Images & Texts

Press release

Andreas Mühe
Stories of Conflict
Extended until 11 September 2022

Collection of Contemporary Art

Andreas Mühe is one of Germany’s best-known artists. His photos revolve around sociological, historical, and political themes, which he stages in elaborately constructed, dramatically lit settings. From 16 February to 11 September 2022, the Städel Museum is presenting a solo exhibition of some 45 works by Mühe, among them better and lesser-known series from his oeuvre to date as well as the cycle Biorobots II (2021), here on view for the first time. In his works, he concerns himself with attribution to collective categories such as family, nationality, politics, and culture as constructs of a social order. His portraits of Angela Merkel are iconic: he accompanied the former federal chancellor on many of her travels and undertook an in-depth analysis of her poses. The degree to which these shots are characterized by a political pictorial language is evident in other photographs of Merkel featuring the artist’s mother as a double. The line between real and staged becomes blurred—in the official and the simulated photos alike. In the town of Wandlitz, Mühe also photographed the houses of the one-time leaders of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED). Surrounded by darkness, they look like mock-ups and belie their historical role. Mühe uses a large-format camera that, on account of its difficult handling, presupposes complex compositions. With a sharply pointed aesthetic, he depicts historical occurrences or their venues in timeless environments. His aim is not to illustrate but to reinterpret the given contents – whether human beings, architecture, or landscape – by pictorial means. Mühe’s photos play with the viewers’ visual habits, an approach also encountered in works in the Städel collection by photographer colleagues of his such as Rodney Graham and Thomas Demand.

“His work is distinguished by his examinations of rifts in society, of violence, of the German-German identity, as well as his interrogations of himself and his own complicated family history. The Städel Museum is devoting its first exhibition of the year 2022 to photographs by Andreas Mühe. We only recently succeeded in acquiring his artwork Under the Tree of 2008 for the collection. Few photographers of the present burrow as painstakingly in German history and our remembrance culture as Andreas Mühe”, comments Städel Museum director Philipp Demandt.

Curator Kristina Lemke, who heads the Städel’s photography collection, adds: “As in a game of deception, Andreas Mühe’s photos always demand a second look. At first sight his works look familiar, but he breaks with expectations and shows how illusory aestheticized pictorial worlds can be.”

Andreas Mühe (b. in Karl-Marx-Stadt, present-day Chemnitz, in 1979) lives and works in Berlin. Following classical training as a photo lab technician, he went into business for himself as a freelance photographer. He specialized in portrait and magazine photography and spent the first ten years of his career carrying out commissions for Süddeutsche Magazin, Die Zeit, Monopol, Vanity Fair, and other publications. His works have been presented nationally and internationally. Major solo exhibitions have taken place at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2017) and the Berlin Nationalgalerie Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Berlin (2019) and caused a sensation. The artist has received numerous photography awards.

Curator: Dr. des. Kristina Lemke (Head of the Photography Collection, Städel Museum) in close cooperation with Andreas Mühe

Press release

Tokens of Friendship
ULRIKE CRESPO’S GIFTS TO THE STÄDEL MUSEUM
24 NOVEMBER 2021 TO 6 MARCH 2022

Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings

It is one of the most important bequests of the past decades: the photographer and philanthropist Ulrike Crespo of Frankfurt left more than 90 outstanding paintings and works on paper to the Städel Museum. Spanning modern and international post-war art, the bequest includes outstanding works by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Jean Dubuffet, Cy Twombly, and many others. One great example is Oskar Schlemmer’s watercolour for his world-famous painting Bauhaus Stairway (New York, Museum of Modern Art).

The Städel Museum is now honouring Ulrike Crespo’s impressive gesture with an exhibition titled “Tokens of Friendship: Ulrike Crespo’s Gifts to the Städel Museum”. From 24 November 2021 to 6 March 2022, selected works from the bequest will enter into dialogue with works from the Städel’s collection. A total of 72 works will be on view, including 44 from the Ulrike Crespo bequest. The donated individual works and workgroups form an excellent complement to the collection of the museum. They enhance existing holdings and close gaps – including those left behind by the Nazi confiscation of artworks within the framework of the ‘degenerate art’ campaign. In the exhibition, selected ‘new arrivals’ and works from the Städel’s collection thus correspond and correlate with one another to the mutual enrichment of both.

‘With her bequest, Ulrike Crespo picked up on the best of Frankfurt’s civic traditions – after all, the Städel Museum owes its very existence to just such an act of patronage. And the masterworks from her legacy could hardly be a more fitting complement to the museum’s holdings. With our special exhibition, we would like to commemorate the donor and celebrate her wonderful gift to Frankfurt. The Städel is deeply indebted to Ulrike Crespo’, commented Städel director Philipp Demandt.

‘One thing was very important to Ulli Crespo: she wanted art to be accessible to the whole society. She wanted to enable even more people to develop their personalities by way of the sensorial-aesthetic experience of art and culture. And to that end, she founded the Crespo Foundation. Her bequest to the Städel Museum is keeping up with that logic. We are extremely delighted about this exhibition in honour of Ulli Crespo’s works and values’, remarked Christiane Riedel, the chairwoman of the Crespo Foundation’s board of trustees.

Download the complete press release here.

Wall texts
Download the complete wall texts of the exhibition "Tokens of Friendship: Ulrike Crespo's Gifts to the Städel Museum" here.

Press release

NEW CLOSE UP REVOLVING AROUND ART & POLITICS IN THE COLLECTION OF CONTEMPORARY ART
New thematic focus of the mediation space // Digital application on site and from now on also for home use // Guided tours

The genre of history painting looks back on a long tradition. Like hardly any other, it is shaped by constantly changing social and political demands. But how do artists process political events from the immediate present? The new CLOSE UP focuses on three works by Bettina Semmer, Armin Boehm, and Dierk Schmidt from the Städel Museum’s Collection of Contemporary Art. They are representative of the artistic treatment of current events in the field of painting – contemporary history painting, so to speak. The artists’ chosen themes are still relevant: From the massacre during the 1972 Summer Olympics and a tragic shipwreck in which hundreds of refugees lost their lives in 2001 to a depiction of the Zhawar Kili region, where a Taliban or Al-Qaeda base is located, and which was bombed between 1998 and 2002. Despite their different themes and artistic approaches, Semmer, Boehm, and Schmidt have one thing in common in regard to their approach: They change and expand the historical model with the means of painting. They confront the viewer, make the invisible visible, and point out various perspectives. The boundaries between objective reproduction and subjective influence or statement are fluid. Their painting leaves the realm of documentation and develops its own narrative. With the means of art, they – directly or indirectly – actively call upon us to take a stand ourselves.

‘The art and mediation space CLOSE UP is constantly changing and draws from the diverse themes of the Collection of Contemporary Art. In the new presentation, the focus is on political art. The selected works are dedicated to historical events from 1972 to 2002. This year has also shown how highly topical the themes dealt with in CLOSE UP are: from the Middle East and Afghanistan conflicts to the crisis of asylum policy. At the same time, social demands on art and artists have changed. CLOSE UP offers the opportunity to explore overarching contexts through digital and analogue immersion’, explain the two project leaders Anne Dribbisch (Art Education) and Svenja Grosser (Collection of Contemporary Art).

In the innovative art and mediation space CLOSE UP, visitors are invited to conduct their own research in front of the original works: How do we deal with images of terror? What is the role of the media, and what role can a painting play? How do artists relate to their works: Are they activists, mediators, or neutral entities? The focus is on topics related to the culture of memory and collective memory, as well as on the power and role of images as carriers of information or means of reproducing political and social events. To these ends, CLOSE UP relies on the interplay of original artworks, wall texts, and a digital application. The broad spectrum of digital mediation – from exhibition films and interviews with artists from the collection to the Digital Collection – complements the encounter with the originals in the museum space. The activating digital application is available on site and as a mobile version for the user’s own device, now also for use at home. Furthermore, guided tours complement the offer in CLOSE UP. They include the various modules and encourage a joint discussion about the various artistic approaches.

CLOSE UP addresses the audience with its diverse expectations and prior knowledge. Although works of contemporary art are closest to the reality of life of today’s visitors, the experiences in the active educational work of recent years have shown that the perception of and engagement with contemporary art is often associated with difficulties. The concept behind CLOSE UP takes this as its starting point and enables the audience both an individual, low-threshold, and partly playful access as well as a more intensive engagement – a kind of self-study of art with its various themes and discourses.

Download the complete press relase here.

Press release
Marc Brandenburg: Hirnsturm II
28 OCTOBER 2021 TO 30 JANUARY 2022

The Städel Museum is presenting a solo exhibition dedicated to Marc Brandenburg from 28 October 2021 to 30 January 2022. Approximately 130 drawings and one video work will be shown in a site-specific installation: Shrouded in black light, Brandenburg’s drawings, inverted into the negative, are reminiscent of a visual diary of thoughts, memories, and sensory impressions from the last thirty years.

‘For nearly three decades, the artist Marc Brandenburg has been working on a graphic Gesamtkunstwerk. In doing so, he constantly expands the boundaries of the traditional medium of drawing and transfers it to our present day – always at the interface with photography, the moving image, sound, or performance. His art builds a bridge to the Städel as a museum of images which, with more than 100,000 works on paper, is home to one of the most important graphic collections in Germany. The audience of the Städel Museum is invited to experience Marc Brandenburg, an inimitable artistic voice of our present’, says Philipp Demandt, Director of the Städel Museum.

At the centre of Marc Brandenburg’s artistic work is the drawing. Since the early 1990s, the artist has been developing his graphic oeuvre, which can also be understood as an almost endless series. To these ends, he resorts to the simplest means: the camera, a photocopier, later a computer, as well as paper and pencil. The starting point for his drawings are mainly photographs he has taken himself, as well as material from other sources. With the help of the copier or an image processing programme, he inverts these photographs and transfers the resulting negative motifs onto the drawings. At times, he precisely executes the background, while at other times the motif is left free; it is occasionally mounted on the empty pictorial background so that it seems to float in space. The presentation of his works in black light adds an additional layer to the pencil drawings and unifies the different contents into a single flood of images – or, as the exhibition title describes it: a Hirnsturm (Brainstorm).

‘It is this idea of an inner storm – this swirl of images, memories, and impressions, that is at the heart of the exhibition. Similarly, the drawings seem to be floating in some dark, undefined, “endless” space. It can be fell like a trip or remind you of a near-death experience. Though my drawings are rarely rooted directly in my biography – I never draw my own memories, meaningful moments, or significant objects – it’s nevertheless present, if transformed, always with a certain detachment’, says Marc Brandenburg about the exhibited works. The artist encounters the subjects and protagonists of his motifs in his own urban environment: from banal objects such as plastic toys, idols from pop culture, and costumed people who seem to have mutated into fantasy creatures, as well as demonstrators and the sleeping places of homeless people. A sense of ambiguity always resonates. Cheerful subjects can seem abysmal, while oppressive living environments radiate a peculiar beauty. Brandenburg does not judge, but rather merely records what he sees.

Download the complete press release here.

Press release
Rembrandt in Amsterdam: Creativitiy and Competition
6 OCTOBER 2021 TO 30 JANUARY 2022

This autumn the Städel Museum is celebrating the work of the greatest of Dutch artists of the 17th century: Rembrandt van Rijn. The exhibition “Rembrandt in Amsterdam: Creativity and Competition” is the first to trace Rembrandt’s rise from a young, ambitious artist from Leiden to a famed master in Amsterdam. The story is told through 60 of Rembrandt’s artworks placed in direct dialogue with paintings by other artists of his time. The exhibition combines the important Frankfurt holdings of Rembrandt’s work, including The Blinding of Samson (1636), with a string of stellar loans from major museums in Europe and North America. Around 140 paintings, prints, and drawings by Rembrandt and his contemporaries – loaned from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, the National Gallery in London, the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington – reveal the artist’s impressive rise, breakthrough, and market domination in the 1630s to the mid-1650s.

As a painter, Rembrandt produced an astonishingly rich and varied oeuvre made up of landscapes, genre scenes, and still lifes, but he is best known for his dramatic history paintings and realistic portraits. His interaction and exchange with other painters shaped both his development as an artist and his entrepreneurial ambitions. Amid the rivalry and competition that characterized the inspiring atmosphere of Amsterdam at the time, where many talented artists were courting the favour of the wealthy bourgeoisie, Rembrandt developed his uniquely expressive visual vernacular, which ultimately allowed him to rise to the top of this fiercely contested art market.

The exhibition is supported by the ING Deutschland bank, Dagmar-Westberg-Stiftung, and the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

“With ‘Rembrandt in Amsterdam’, the Städel Museum takes a close look at one of the most celebrated figures in the history of art. Through more than 40 works from our own collection and 94 important international loans, we retrace the decisive years of Rembrandt’s career and follow him on his path to success and mastery – over his rivals and in his art. Two years after ‘Making Van Gogh’, our Rembrandt exhibition also signals a new start for Frankfurt – we wish to thank the supporters of this exceptional project, as well as the local citizens, partners, foundations, and companies whose overwhelming solidarity has kept us going over the past months, more than ever before,” states Philipp Demandt, director of the Städel Museum.

“Rembrandt went his own way ¬– with inspiration and innovation, a keen sense of the importance of networking and collaboration, but also with a stubborn streak and a good dose of willpower and drive. These attributes are still what determine the fate of projects in today’s world. We believe in the power of art to inspire innovation and change. At ING Deutschland, with headquarters in Frankfurt and strong ties to Amsterdam, we are therefore thrilled to support this extraordinary exhibition at the Städel Museum and help retrace Rembrandt’s path”, is how Nick Jue, CEO of ING Deutschland, describes the company’s support to the exhibition.

“The Städelscher Museums-Verein has been supporting the Städel’s museum work for over 120 years, so we are delighted to lend our support to this new exhibition venture. When we think of Rembrandt, we not only think of the most innovative artist of his time, but also of the spectacular acquisition of his large history painting The Blinding of Samson for the Städel Museum’s collection. It was thanks in part to our engagement that this exciting work was acquired in 1905. It is therefore no coincidence that it holds a special place in the exhibition. Its story is even told in that most modern of formats: the podcast, with four episodes all to itself,” explains Sylvia von Metzler, president of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

“Today the name Rembrandt is still an international brand, and his artworks are coveted ‘blue chips’. That said, during his lifetime he had to make a name for himself on the Amsterdam art market, where competition among artists reached unparalleled heights. Rembrandt’s exceptional ability to convincingly penetrate the psychology of the figures he portrayed is his enduring trademark. The exhibition examines the work of Rembrandt and his competitors, colleagues, and pupils in the febrile artistic milieu of mid-17th century Amsterdam,” explains Jochen Sander, the exhibition’s curator, vice director, and curator of Dutch, Flemish, and German paintings before 1800 at the Städel Museum.

THE EXHIBITION
“Rembrandt in Amsterdam: Creativity and Competition” follows a thematically structured route. The architecture of the galleries allows Rembrandt’s work to enter into a free dialogue with that of his contemporaries.

When Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn arrived in Amsterdam in the early 1630s, he was far from unknown. In the global trading capital of Amsterdam, the art-buying public was not limited to the wealthy mercantile class but included artisans and mariners as well. Seeking to distinguish himself from his competitors through more than just style, Rembrandt began signing his works with merely his first name shortly after setting up in Amsterdam. This has become one of his most distinctive trademarks. His inventiveness soon impressed the local bourgeoisie whose commissions initially made him a sought-after portraitist. As demonstrated by the exhibited Portrait of Andries de Graeff from 1639 (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Museumslandschaft Hessen, Kassel), Rembrandt had to the power to capture the vivid, immediate expression of the sitter. This becomes particularly evident when juxtaposed with portraits by his Amsterdam rivals, such as Nicolaes Eliasz. Pickenoy’s stately, life-size Portrait of a Man (1628, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe).

In addition to commissioned portraits, Rembrandt painted self-portraits throughout his life. Studying his own face – whether in paintings, drawings, or etchings – allowed Rembrandt to explore the expression of every imaginable feeling and emotional state. Rembrandt also used his self-portraits and head studies as a calling card to promote himself and his artistic abilities. They too became a kind of signature as he incorporated his own facial features into character sketches called tronies. The painting Tronie of a Man with a Feathered Beret (c. 1635–1640, Mauritshuis, The Hague) is a particularly impressive example of this.

Soon after settling in Amsterdam, Rembrandt joined the Guild of Saint Luke in 1634. As a member of the professional association of artists, Rembrandt was now able to establish his own workshop, achieve independence as a businessman, and teach paying pupils. At least 40 young artists went through his workshop in Amsterdam. Through their work, every student actively contributed to building the reputation of the Rembrandt brand. Yet Rembrandt encouraged his pupils to develop their own creative variations rather than merely copy his work. The creative exchange with other talented artists therefore exerted a consistent influence on his art and that of this workshop assistants.

Rembrandt was a master of several painting genres: portraits and tronies, narrative histories, landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes. Among his contemporaries, Rembrandt was considered a universal artist. Through his masterful handling of light and chromatic effects, he was able to render precious materials on canvas, as evidenced by his mysterious Heroine from the Old Testament (1632/1633, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). Rembrandt was without peer in his ability to heighten the intensity of his pictures by condensing the narrative into a single decisive scene. His histories depict stirring moments with the power to move, unsettle, and even alarm the spectator. But despite this, Rembrandt’s figures are nuanced and convey ambiguity and doubt, particularly in their facial expressions, as exemplified by the figure of King Saul in the picture David Playing the Harp for Saul (c. 1630–1631, Städel Museum).
Occasionally Rembrandt’s work also reveals a coarse and humorous streak. His sense of graphic detail and irony is manifested in The Abduction of Ganymede (1635, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister): rather than depicting Ganymede as an attractive boy in the iconographic tradition of Michelangelo’s famous drawing, which was very popular at the time, Rembrandt paints him as a plump toddler.

Rembrandt’s representations of nature – such as the etching The Three Trees (1643, Städel Museum) or Landscape with a Stone Bridge (c. 1638, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) – reveal how he used visual effects in an attempt to tangibly render light and weather phenomena and movement in nature. At the time, his work represented a startling alternative to that of other painters who specialized in southern landscapes bathed in Italian light which were an easy sell on the art market.

Starting in the middle of the 17th century, the artists in Amsterdam, much like their French counterparts before them, began turning to the rules of classical antiquity for inspiration: light colours and clear structures gained in popularity. This new classicism was radically different from Rembrandt’s painting style. Nowhere is this more evident than in the juxtaposition of Rembrandt’s painting Diana and Her Nymphs bathing, with the Stories of Actaeon and Callisto (1634, Sammlung der Fürsten zu Salm-Salm, Wasserburg Anholt, Isselburg) and Jacob van Loos’s Diana and Her Nymphs (1654, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen). In fact, Rembrandt moved further and further away from contemporary taste in his later work, employing a dark palette and thick impasto from the mid-1650s onwards. As a result, his dominant position on the Amsterdam art market already came to an end during his lifetime.

The exhibition is organized by the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Wall texts
Download the complete wall texts of the exhibition "Rembrandt in Amsterdam: Creativity and Competition" here.

Wall and label texts

Download the complete wall and label texts for the exhibition "Städel’s Legacy: Master Drawings from the Founder’s Collection" here.

The Städel Museum has appointed Kristina Lemke to head up its Collection of Photography. The announcement marks the establishment of a new position at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, one that will oversee the research and presentation of the museum’s photographic holdings, which currently comprise over 5,000 images. Art historian Kristina Lemke has just completed her PhD and has been working as a research associate at the museum since 2018. "New Ways of Seeing: The Photography of the 1920s and ‘30s", on view from 30 June, will be her first exhibition curated for the museum. Laying the groundwork for the exhibition, a symposium on the photography of the interwar years was held at the museum last year.

Download the complete press release here.

Rembrandt Digitorial^®
Download the complete press release to the Rembrandt Digitorial^® here.