Ausstellungen | Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz

Schloßbergmuseum
6. Mar 2022 – 5. Jun 2022

Mechanical animal world

A French frog, American birds and Japanese fishes are guests of the Schlossbergmuseum Chemnitz. These artificial but nonetheless movable toys have been shown with the exhibition Mechanische Tierwelt – mechanical animal world in various museums of the Federal Republic, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria. The collection of the two Berlin photographers Volker Weinhold and Sebastian Köpcke includes 200 functioning mechanical animals from international manufacturers from 1900 to 1970 out of 14 countries. They are being ...

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Museum Gunzenhauser
6. Mar 2022 – 12. Jun 2022

Max Peiffer Watenphul

Max Peiffer Watenphul was a doctor of law, a Bauhaus student, a teacher at the Folkwang School in Essen and a lover of Italy. Museum Gunzenhauser is devoting a retrospective exhibition to this particular artist with works from its collection. Max Pfeiffer Watenphul discovered his love of painting by engaging with the magazine Valori Plastici and with Paul Klee, whom he followed to the Bauhaus. There he was active in all the workshops, developing a ...

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Kunstsammlungen am Theaterplatz
27. Mar 2022 – 26. Jun 2022

Brücke und Blauer Reiter

Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, and also Marc, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff – few other artists are of such enormous significance for the development of modern art in Germany. They and their artist-friends belonged to the two most important artists’ groups of early modernism: Brücke und Blauer Reiter. Today those names stand for the awakening of the Expressionist avant-gardes prior to the First World War, as they liberated colour from any compulsion to reproduce reality and led art towards ...

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Schloßbergmuseum
10. Apr 2022 – 26. Jun 2022

Of gods, men and heroic sagas

The themes »Gods« and »Heroic Sages« have stimulated peoples’ imaginations from time immemorial. Artists have repeatedly sought to engage with and continue these themes by means of new interpretations. Those artists include Joachim Karsch and Manfred Pietsch. Karsch’s sculptures are oriented around the artistic ideas of Expressionism. It is of great importance to him to reflect on human sensitivities. The younger artist, Manfred Pietsch, felt especially drawn to mythological and biblical themes and has processed ...

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Museum Gunzenhauser
12. Jun 2022 – 4. Sep 2022

Des Pudels Kern

»So that was the poodle’s core,« cried Goethe’s Faust in amazement as the animal transformed itself into Mephistopheles. This expression is still used today to mean the essence or crux of a matter. Illustrations, too, employ techniques of visualisation, exaggeration and comment. For the first time, the exhibition presents prints from the Museum Gunzenhauser collection that are based on literary sources, poems, stories and fairy tales. These include illustrations by Marcus Behmer referencing Honoré de ...

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Museum Gunzenhauser
9. Jul 2022 – 16. Oct 2022

Andrzej Steinbach

Andrzej Steinbach, who grew up in Chemnitz, no longer regards the documentary aspect of photography as providing a copy of external reality. Instead he relies deliberately on mises-en-scene or stagings when devoting his attention to social themes. In doing so he uses photography’s inherent promise of reality media and political issues. Work is the subject of the Chemnitz exhibition Tanz die Maschine (Dance the Machine): people, bodies, machines and their actions are the main motif. ...

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Schloßbergmuseum
10. Jul 2022 – 11. Sep 2022

The world in a box

In the period around 1760, fairground people at annual funfairs promised audiences the illusion of a trip to distant cities by allowing them to look into a box. Views of gondolas and sailing boats, castles and cathedrals, gardens and airships could be seen with the aid of one or two optical lenses and a mirror together with pictures with a heightened perspective. The 35 colourful sheets from the Graphics Section of the Schloßbergmuseum originated from ...

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Kunstsammlungen am Theaterplatz
17. Jul 2022 – 31. Oct 2022

Michael Morgner

What shapes a human life? For the Chemnitz artist Michael Morgner it is the experience of war and of loss, the influence of political regimes on personal freedom, death and anxiety, but also overcoming them, rising up again after blows of fate, and new beginnings after social upheavel. Morgner deals with these existential themes in his artistic work. Morgner grew up in Einsiedel where he still lives today, apart from a few brief interruptions. In ...

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Kunstsammlungen am Theaterplatz
24. Jul 2022 – 23. Oct 2022

Timelessly beautiful

For the first time in the history of the Chemnitz museum a representative selection from the valuable wallpaper holdings dating from around 1900 is being shown. Thanks to deliberate purchases of complete pattern collections from French merchants, and to extensive donations, for example, by the Chemnitz wallpaper manufacturer Max Langhammer, the Textile and Decorative Arts Collection in Chemnitz has more than 1,000 wallpapers today. Among them are German and Viennese brands, also numerous English, American ...

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Schloßbergmuseum
16. Oct 2022 – 28. Feb 2023

Metamorphosis

Old Chemnitz was destroyed during the Second World War. But was Chemnitz really »old« in the pre-war period? Thanks to the then young medium of photography, the enormous changes that took place in the city’s structure between 1870 and 1914 are documented in photographs from the collections of the Schloßbergmuseum. Industrialisation in the 19th century initiated a process of change of hitherto unknown dimensions. In the boom of the Gründerjahre Chemnitz grew to be a ...

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Kunstsammlungen am Theaterplatz
13. Nov 2022 – 5. Feb 2023

Meta blue

In 2020, the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz received its most comprehensive individual donation in the history of the museum to date from the Thomas family of collectors. Brigitte und Hans Robert Thomas in Weiden in the Upper Palatinate gathered an outstanding collection of printed works. These include works by the artists Horst Antes, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Eduardo Chillida, Piero Dorazio, Otto Dix, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Günther Förg, Horst Janssen, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Serge Poliakoff, Günther Uecker and ...

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Museum Gunzenhauser
13. Nov 2022 – 12. Feb 2023

New Acquisitions of the Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany

The Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany has been documenting developments in art in the country since 1970. Meanwhile the collections amounts to about 1,700 works and is administered and supervised by the Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. In 2021 additional works were acquired with funds from the promotion programme NEUSTART KULTUR. These and a selection of other works purchased for the Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany between ...

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Kunstsammlungen am Theaterplatz
20. Nov 2022 – 26. Feb 2023

Between avant-garde and repression

Following the classical avant-gardes in Paris around 1930, an exhibition of Czech Photography in the post-war period will now focus on another major chapter in the history of European photography. The centre of attention will be five Czech photographers from that period: Josef Sudek, Vilém Reichmann, Emila Medková, Jan Svoboda and Josef Koudelka. Medková and Reichmann positioned themselves decisively in the surrealist tradition of the inter-war period when, on their forays through Prague and Brno, ...

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