Art after 1945
from 6 March 2026
National Socialism marked a profound turning point, including for art. After the end of the Second World War, (European) totalitarian dictatorships favoured realism. At the same time, art forms developed in both Eastern and Western Europe that drew on abstraction, which had been defamed as ‘degenerate’ in the course of National Socialist cultural policy. In this way, artists attempted to shed the past and their experiences. In the 1950s and 1960s, abstraction was the general, almost unchallenged consensus, especially in West German art. Important impulses came from France and the USA. Alfred Gunzenhauser’s collection also includes works by important artists of post-war abstract modernism such as Serge Poliakoff, Geometric abstraction meets dynamic, material and large-scale colourfulness here. The visual language of abstraction repeatedly challenges viewers in a special way. The exhibition presents the artists’ different focuses – on colour, form, rhythm or materiality – in thematic rooms.
In addition, Pop Art emerged in America around 1960 and became a universal and cross-class cultural phenomenon. During this period, a generation of artists, including Andy Warhol, emerged and founded American Pop Art as a figurative counter-movement to Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting. Pop Art sought to elevate mass-market items to the status of art. The object itself was not the subject, but rather its mass-produced image. American Pop Art influenced the German artist Uwe Lausen. Staging, provocation, breaking taboos, drugs, violence – the artist’s works are unique in the 1960s. They were created at a time marked by considerable upheaval and change, when a new generation was breaking with traditional conventions.
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