Abstraktion after 1945
National Socialism meant a deep break for art. After the end of the Second World War, the (European) totalitarian dictatorships favoured realism. At the same time, art forms developed in both Eastern and Western Europe that took up abstraction, which had been defamed as “degenerate” in the course of National Socialist cultural policy. Abstraction attempted to brush aside the experienced past and was the general, almost unchallenged consensus in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in West German art. Important impulses came from France and the USA.
Alfred Gunzenhauser‘s collection also includes important artists of postwar abstract modernism such as Serge Poliakoff, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Fritz Winter and Carl Buchheister. Geometric abstraction meets dynamic, material and large-scale colourfulness here. The pictorial language of abstraction challenges the viewer again and again in a special way. The exhibition presents the different focuses of the artists in thematic rooms: on colour, form, rhythm, materiality or gestures.
