Images & Texts

PRESS RELEASE
RESEARCHING RENI – A NEW SHINE FOR GUIDO RENI’S MASTERPIECE
LIVE EVENT WITH RESEARCH INSIGHTS INTO THE CONSERVATION OF GUIDO RENI’S MASTERPIECE “CHRIST AT THE COLUMN” ON 12 JULY 2022
PARTNERSHIP WITH BANK OF AMERICA’S ART CONSERVATION PROJECT

One of the most celebrated artworks by the Italian Baroque painter Guido Reni (1575–1642) is currently in conservation at the Städel Museum. Christ at the Column (c. 1604) is a masterpiece by the star painter of the 17th century. The conservation is made possible through the support of funding through Bank of America’s Art Conservation Project. The conservation work sees the removal of old varnish from the painting along with retouching and overpainting that has taken place over the years.

The masterpiece will be presented to the public in a major exhibition dedicated to the rediscovery of the artist, at the Städel Museum in autumn 2022. Prior to that, the curator and the conservation department will be providing insight into the history of the artwork and the conservation process in an online presentation on Tuesday, 12 July 2022 at 4 pm CET. The online event will be broadcast live from the museum’s conservation department to the Städel’s YouTube-channel.

Download the complete press release here.

Wall texts
SELF. DETERMINED: THE PAINTER OTTILIE W. ROEDERSTEIN
20 JULY TO 16 OCTOBER 2022

Introduction
The German-Swiss painter Ottilie W. Roederstein (1859–1937) was one of the outstanding women artists of the period around 1900. She was firmly established in the male-dominated art world and gained recognition for her work in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad. Roederstein produced a multifaceted oeuvre mirroring many of the stylistic trends of early modernism in art: from academic painting to symbolist and impressionist means of expression to a reductive, objective approach. She never ventured into the realm of abstraction, however, but remained indebted to reality as her model. As a freelance artist, Roederstein deliberately disregarded the societal norms of her time, which left women no scope for personal or professional development. The self-portraits she executed in great number throughout her long career testify to her critical stance on traditional gender roles. From 1891 onwards, after training in Zurich, Berlin, and Paris, Roederstein lived with her partner, the physician Elisabeth Winterhalter, in Frankfurt am Main. The painter was well connected in local artist circles and cultivated extensive contact to many leading Frankfurt families whose members she portrayed prolifically. Roederstein’s work is closely intertwined with the history of the Städel Museum and the city of Frankfurt. Her studio in the Städelsche Kunstschule was just a few steps away from the museum, which she visited regularly, its collection being an important source of inspiration for her art. In 1909, Roederstein and Winterhalter moved to the neighbouring town of Hofheim am Taunus. There, towards the end of her career, the painter was able to devote herself to new artistic experiments in her own studio building and found her way to her ‘eigene Handschrift’, as she called it: her own personal style. The exhibition retraces Roederstein’s stylistic development and her exceptional and successful career.

Press release

Into the New. Being Human: From Pollock to Bourgeois
6 APRIL TO 17 JULY 2022

Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings

After more than twenty-five years, the Städel Museum is once again dedicating an exhibition to American art on paper from 1945 to the present. From 6 April to 17 July 2022, some fifty outstanding prints, drawings, and multiples by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Kiki Smith, or Kara Walker will be presented, all of which deal with the theme of being human.

American art of the past eighty years is full of boundary crossings and contradictions. It is as unconventional as it is multifaceted: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Concept Art, Minimal and Performance Art. In a relatively short period of time after 1945, various and at times contradictory aesthetic concepts developed in New York and (later) on the West Coast. Artists chose their media and materials freely and strategically – depending on the message they wanted to convey. Printmaking played a key role in this context. As a laboratory for experimentation in form and content alike, it offered artists new possibilities. From the 1960s onward, this went hand in hand with the founding of new printing and paper workshops. Artists collaborated closely with these workshops to produce technically sophisticated prints and objects (multiples), often in self-confidently large formats. This printmaking revolution went down in art history as the ‘Graphic Boom’.

Under the influence of ever-new political, economic, and societal upheavals and crises, many of the works revolve around human existence itself. Naturalistic depictions of the human figure now give way to the sign-like and abstract, the incomplete, the imprint, the blank space. Artists reflect on human perception and experience as fragmentary and question language as an instrument for describing the world.

Download the complete press release here.

PRESS RELASE

RENOIR. ROCOCO REVIVAL.
IMPRESSIONISM AND THE FRENCH ART OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
2 MARCH TO 19 JUNE 2022

Exhibition Annex

Pierre-Auguste Renoir is one of the outstanding painters of French Impressionism – and far more than that. From 2 March to 19 July 2022, for the first time the Städel Museum will be addressing the surprising references in his art to Rococo painting in a large-scale special exhibition. Whereas Rococo painting was considered frivolous and immoral after the French Revolution, it underwent a revival in the nineteenth century and was widely visible in Renoir’s lifetime. Having trained as a porcelain painter, he was also intimately acquainted with the imagery of artists such as Antoine Watteau, Baptiste Siméon Chardin, François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. He shared the Rococo’s predilection for certain subjects, among them promenaders in the park and on the riverbank, moments of repose in the outdoors, and the garden party. Renoir also frequently devoted himself to the depiction of domestic scenes and family life as well as intimate moments such as bathing, reading or making music. Yet he not only took orientation from the motifs of the Rococo, but also particularly admired its loose and sketchy manner of painting as well as its brilliant palette, aspects that would have a formative influence on him and many other artists in the Impressionist circle.

The exhibition at the Städel presents the complex history of the Rococo’s reception in nineteenth-century France. Trenchant juxtapositions of Renoir’s art with works of the eighteenth century as well as his own contemporaries – Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot – will provide an overview of Impressionism’s intense artistic examination of the Rococo.

Curatorial team: Dr Alexander Eiling (Head of Modern Art, Städel Museum), Dr Juliane Betz (Deputy Head of Modern Art, Städel Museum), Dr Fabienne Ruppen (Research Assistant, Modern Art, Städel Museum)
Sponsored by: Savings Banks Finance Group with Deutsche Leasing AG, Frankfurter Sparkasse and Savings Banks Cultural Fund of the German Savings Banks Association, the Städelsche Museums-Verein e.V. with the STÄDELFREUNDE 1815, Dagmar-Westberg-Stiftung

Download the complete press release here.

Wall texts
Download the complete wall texts of the exhibition "RENOIR. ROCOCO REVIVAL. Impressionism and the French Art of the Eighteenth Century" here.

SINCE THE OPENING, 100,000 VISITORS TO “REMBRANDT IN AMSTERDAM” – GREAT SUCCESS IN VIEW OF COVID RESTRICTIONS

Since the opening of “Rembrandt in Amsterdam: Creativity and Competition”, 100,000 visitors have already seen the exhibition at the Städel Museum. Despite current pandemic-related restrictions, the works of Rembrandt – the greatest Dutch artist of the 17th century – are inspiring a wide audience in Frankfurt. The show with outstanding international loans had to be postponed by almost a year and was finally able to open its doors on 6 October 2021. The digital offers developed by the Städel Museum, which enable visitors to visit the exhibition on their own, are also very popular. For example, more than 1,300 interested visitors took part in the online offer Museum at Home – Live for the Rembrandt exhibition. To date, the comprehensive Digitorial® has been accessed more than 50,000 times, and the podcast ‘Blinded by Rembrandt’ has been streamed more than 69,000 times. The general guided tours on site, which were developed as part of the current hygiene concept, were also in great demand; so far, more than 3,300 visitors have been able to experience the exhibition in guided tours. The exhibition is still open for a fortnight up to and including 30 January.

Download the complete press release here.

PRESS RELEASE
BEFORE DÜRER: The Engraving Becomes Art
28 SEPTEMBER 2022 TO 22 JANUARY 2023

Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Press preview: 27 September 2022, 11 am

The Städel Museum is devoting an exhibition to the engraving in its early days as an artistic pictorial medium. From 28 September 2022 to 22 January 2023, the show will present some 130 important German and Netherlandish engravings of the fifteenth century, and thus retrace the development of the medium from its simple beginnings to ever more sophisticated creations. Outstanding prints by Martin Schongauer, Wenzel von Olmütz, and Israhel van Meckenem, but also by anonymous early engravers such as the Master ES, the Master with the Banderoles, and the Master b(x)g will be on view. A selection of early engravings by the great German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer will round out the presentation.

The engraving is one of the oldest techniques used in Europe to print images. An intaglio printing method, it developed around 1430/1440 out of the art of metal engraving in goldsmith workshops. On the Upper and Lower Rhine, and not long afterwards in Italy as well, goldsmiths and painters began engraving religious and secular depictions on copper plates from which they then printed them on paper. Thus reproduced, the compositions served purposes of private devotion or as models, not only for other engravers, but also for painters, stained-glass makers, and sculptors. A new pictorial world gradually evolved and spread in the form of prints. This imagery owes its special appeal—which is as strong as ever today—to its simple but nonetheless effective graphic pictorial language, its immediacy, and its fascinating narrative qualities.

Philipp Demandt, director of the Städel Museum, comments about the show: ‘The extremely rare early engravings not only offer insights into the world of the Late Middle Ages but—as printed, reproduced, and circulated images—also play a highly consequential role in art history in general. Thanks to Johann David Passavant, the first head of the Städel collection, the museum today has superb examples in its possession. Our exhibition vividly illustrates how the engraving evolved to become an innovative and dynamic pictorial medium and thus later helped Albrecht Dürer, the greatest artist of the German Renaissance, to fame.’

Curator: Dr Martin Sonnabend (Head of the Department of Prints and Drawings before 1750, Städel Museum)
Opening hours of the Department of Prints and Drawings Study Room: Wed, Fri 2–5 pm, Thu 2–7 pm. Please book in advance by e-mail to graphischesammlung@staedelmuseum.de, stating the date, arrival time, and length of your stay.

Exhibition Programme 2022

Andreas Mühe: Stories of Conflict
16 February to 19 June 2022
Contemporary Art Collection
Press preview: 15 February 2022, 11.00 am

Andreas Mühe (b. in Karl-Marx-Stadt, present-day Chemnitz, in 1979) is one of Germany’s best-known photo artists. He addresses himself to sociological, historical, and political themes, which he stages in elaborately constructed, dramatically lit settings. His art revolves around breaks in society, violence, and German-German identity, but also interrogations of the self and his own complex family history. From 16 February to 19 June 2022, the Städel Museum is presenting better and lesser-known series from Mühe’s œuvre. In these works, numbering approximately 45 in all, he explores the formation of identity and the attribution of collective categories such as family, nationality, politics, or culture as constructs of a social order. His portraits of Angela Merkel are iconic: he accompanied the 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 deceptively real-looking 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’s visual worlds are games of deception whose effect aesthetics are always ambiguous. He strives not for illustrations but for images that subject their contents—whether human beings, architecture, or landscapes—to new interpretation.

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

RENOIR. ROCOCO REVIVAL.
Impressionism and the French Art of the Eighteenth Century
2 March to 19 June 2022
Exhibition annex
Press preview: 1 March 2022, 11.00 am

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) is one of the outstanding painters of French Impressionism. Venturing beyond the bounds of that characterization, the Städel Museum is now staging a major special exhibition that takes the first-ever in-depth look at the surprising connections between Renoir’s art and Rococo painting. Whereas the latter was considered frivolous and immoral after the French Revolution, it underwent a revival in the nineteenth century and was widely visible in Renoir’s lifetime. He was also intimately acquainted with the imagery of artists such as Antoine Watteau, Baptiste Siméon Chardin, François Boucher, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard from his training as a porcelain painter. He shared the Rococo’s predilection for certain themes, among them promenaders in the park and on the riverbank, moments of repose in the out of doors, and the garden party. Renoir also frequently devoted himself to the depiction of domestic scenes and family life as well as intimate moments such as bathing, reading, or making music. Yet he not only took orientation from the motifs of the Rococo, but also particularly admired its loose and sketchy manner of painting as well as its brilliant palette, aspects that would have a formative influence on him and many other artists of the Impressionist circle.
Taking highlights of the Städel such as Renoir’s After the Luncheon (1879) and Antoine Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera (ca. 1709–10) as its point of departure, the exhibition will show altogether some 120 outstanding paintings, works on paper and craft objects from international museums such as the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, as well as private collections. “Renoir. Rococo Revival.” will offer comprehensive insights into the complex history of the Rococo’s reception in nineteenth-century France. And trenchant juxtapositions of Renoir’s art with works of the eighteenth century as well as his own contemporaries—Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Berthe Morisot—will provide an overview of Impressionism’s intense artistic preoccupation with the Rococo.

Curators: Dr. Alexander Eiling (Head of Modern Art, Städel Museum), Dr. Juliane Betz (Deputy Head of Modern Art, Städel Museum), Dr. Fabienne Ruppen (Research Assistant, Modern Art, Städel Museum)
Sponsored by: Savings Banks Finance Group with Deutsche Leasing AG, Frankfurter Sparkasse and Savings Banks Cultural Fund of the German Savings Banks Association; Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V. with the STÄDELFREUNDE 1815

Into the New—Being Human: From Pollock to Bourgeois
6 April to 17 July 2022
Exhibition hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Press preview: 5 April 2022, 11.00 am

American post-1945 art is as unconventional as it is diverse. Starting in the 1960s, artists looked especially to printmaking in their search for new paths—a development that went down in history as the Graphic Boom or Graphic Revolution. The Städel Museum has been collecting contemporary American art on paper since that time. Thanks to ongoing support from the Heinz und Gisela Friederichs-Stiftung as well as the Städelscher Museums-Vereins e.V., the holdings today encompass outstanding works by well-known artists from Jackson Pollock to Louise Bourgeois. From 6 April to 17 July 2022, the Städel Museum is presenting a selection of some 50 prints, drawings, and multiples from this rich collection. They revolve around the state of being human, a theme as old as it is fundamental, and one that preoccupied many artists after World War II. In their art, mimetic representations of the human figure gave way to the abstract-symbolic, the fragment, the imprint, even the void. Human perception and experience seemed disjointed; language as an instrument for describing the world was called into question. The examples on view testify to how artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, and many others developed artistic strategies to negotiate human existence, also their own.

Curator: Dr. Regina Freyberger (Head of Prints and Drawings after 1750, Städel Museum)
The exhibition catalogue is being supported by the Georg und Franziska Speyersche Hochschulstiftung.

Ugo Rondinone
Postponed to Summer 2023
Städel Garden

For technical reasons, we have decided, together with the artist, to postpone the exhibition of his sculptural group “sunrise. east”, originally planned to go on view from 24 June to 30 October 2022: The works will now be presented in the Städel Garden in the summer of 2023. The exhibition will be the first garden project after the redesign of the Städel Museum’s sculpture garden.
The exhibition “Ugo Rondinone. Life Time” at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt will take place as planned.

In summer 2023, the prominent hill overarching the Städel Garden Halls will be transformed into a strange landscape where grotesque beings will welcome the public. In his workgroup Sunrise: East, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) assigns every month a head with characteristic, but also strongly reduced facial features. Shaped in silvery-shiny aluminium, the clunky, over-life-sized sculptural heads are reduced to their facial expressions: their mouths agape, they gaze through tiny eyes with an air now friendly and naïve, now sceptical, now surprised, now ghoulish. Reminiscent of ritual masks and spirits but also the pictorial language of comics, emoticons, and memes, they trigger a wide range of associations. The visitors to the Städel Garden are invited to encounter all twelve beings—and thus all twelve months—face to face, and to experience the joys, adversities, and emotions of an entire year. Concurrently with the intervention in the Städel Garden, the exhibition Ugo Rondinone: Life Time will be on view at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

Curator: Svenja Grosser, (Deputy Head of Contemporary Art, Städel Museum)

Self. Determined.
The Painter Ottilie W. Roederstein
20 July to 16 October 2022
Exhibition annex
Press preview: 19 July 2022, 11.00 am

The German-Swiss painter Ottilie W. Roederstein (1859–1937) was one of the outstanding women artists of the period around 1900. After training in Zurich, Berlin, and Paris, she lived in Frankfurt am Main from 1891 to 1909, when she and her partner, the gynaecologist Elisabeth Winterhalter, settled in the neighbouring town of Hofheim am Taunus. As a freelance portraitist, Roederstein was a firmly established name in the male-dominated world of art and self-confidently defied prevailing societal norms. Her multifaceted œuvre mirrors numerous modernist tendencies, from academic art and experiments with old-masterly tempera painting to stylistic devices of Impressionism, Symbolism, and New Objectivity. Despite her extensive exhibition activities and her onetime reputation, she is today virtually unknown. The Städel Museum is presenting a comprehensive retrospective that, comprising altogether 75 paintings and drawings, retraces the artistic development of this stylistically eclectic female painter. Roederstein's 28 works in the Städel collection form the core of the exhibition and constitute one of the most important holdings of her artworks, on a par with those of the Stadtmuseum Hofheim am Taunus and the Kunsthaus Zürich. The artist’s work is intimately interwoven with the history of the Städel Museum and the city of Frankfurt. Works by Roederstein already entered the Städel collection during her lifetime and her studio at the Städelschule was just steps away from the museum. With an abundance of historical photographs, documents, and letters, the exhibition sheds light on Roederstein's role as an influential networker and teacher.

The exhibition was realized in cooperation with the Kunsthaus Zürich.

Curators: Dr. Alexander Eiling (Head of Modern Art, Städel Museum), Eva-Maria Höllerer (Research Assistant, Modern Art, Städel Museum)
Archive: Dr. Iris Schmeisser (Head of Provenance Research and the Historical Archive, Städel Museum)
Sponsored by: Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain GmbH
With support from: Friede Springer Stiftung, Max Ernst von Grunelius Stiftung

Before Dürer: The Engraving Becomes Art
28 September 2022 to 22 January 2023
Exhibition hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Press preview: 27 September 2022, 11.00 am

In the fifteenth century, even before the invention of letterpress printing with movable type, the first techniques for printing images were developed. The woodcut led the way, with the technically more complex engraving following close on its heels. Emerging around 1430/40 from the gold engraving craft, the engraving not only provided a further method of reproducing religious and secular images, but also offered new artistic possibilities. Early on, for example, the Master E. S. (active 1440/50–1467) developed a systematic graphic language that would be capable of competing with the quality of painting. Martin Schongauer (ca. 1445–1491) perfected the process to the point where it could produce masterworks of a high technical and artistic standard. Nineteenth-century art historians—influenced, as they were, by Romanticism—were enchanted by the beauty of early engravings, which they perceived as direct and pure. A case in point is the Städel director Johann David Passavant who, around mid-century, amassed an outstanding collection of these works, many of which had survived in only a few prints. From 28 September 2022 to 8 January 2023, the Städel Museum is presenting a selection of especially superb and rare works from its collection. Apart from the Master E. S. and Martin Schongauer, it will feature numerous other engravers such as the Master of the Banderoles, the Master bxg, the Master AG, Wenzel von Olmütz, the prolific Israhel van Meckenem, and others. Some of Albrecht Dürer’s earliest engravings, dating from the final years of the fifteenth century, will round out the presentation.

Curator: Dr. Martin Sonnabend (Head of Prints and Drawings before 1750, Städel Museum)

GUIDO RENI. The divine
23 November 2022 to 5 March 2023
Exhibition annex
Press preview: 22 November 2022, 11.00 am

Misunderstood, ignored, forgotten—in a large-scale exhibition to take place in the winter of 2022/23, the Städel Museum is rediscover the onetime star painter of the Italian Baroque: Guido Reni (1575–1642). Despised in the nineteenth century on account of the aesthetic preferences of that era, later relegated to the sidelines by the one-sided concentration on his rival Caravaggio, Reni today no longer occupies the place he deserves in the public consciousness. In his own day, he was one of Europe’s most successful and most celebrated painters, sought after by such prominent patrons as the Borghese Pope Paul V, the Duke of Mantua, and the Queen of England. A contemporary biography provides insights into his artistic activities in Bologna and Rome, but also his ambiguous personality: it portrays him as an artist both deeply religious and superstitious, both tremendously successful and hopelessly addicted to gambling.
Whether his subject matter was the Christian heaven or the world of classical mythology, Guido Reni was unmatched in his ability to translate the beauty of the divine into painting. In cooperation with the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, the Städel Museum is bringing his fascinating paintings, drawings, and etchings together in an exhibition for the first time in more than thirty years, and thus offering a new perspective on his art. In addition to outstanding loans from well-known collections such as the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, the Uffizi in Florence, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the LACMA in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Louvre in Paris, the show will feature several recently discovered works by Reni that have never before been on view in an exhibition.

An exhibition of the Städel Museum in cooperation with the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Curator: Dr. Bastian Eclercy (Head Italian, French, and Spanish Paintings before 1800, Städel Museum)
PROJECT MANAGEMENT: Aleksandra Rentzsch (Assistant Curator of Italian, French and Spanish paintings before 1800)

Sponsored by: Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain gGmbH

The titles and exhibition dates are subject to change.

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.