Anna Oppermann

Glaube

group show

19 May  – 18 August.2019

In 2019 and 2020, the Draiflessen Collection is presenting three consecutive art exhibitions that highlight particular aspects of what the terms faith, love, and hope mean in modern and contemporary times through a consideration of modern and contemporary works of art.

The first exhibition focuses on the concept of faith, understood as an affirming relationship with a supernatural or divine force. Directly linked with the concept of faith is that of doubt. The Draiflessen presentation brings together works of photography, painting, sculpture, installation and video art. The selected artists anticipated traditional pictorial motifs, including Christian ones, but remained at a far remove from the invoked traditions. They worked with inversions and contradictions, raising doubt and allowing questions to emerge rather than resolving them. Recurrent themes are death, grief, spirituality, distance from salvation, (salvific) redemption, fear, ecstasy, emptiness. The plots seem at once familiar and disturbing. They are evocative of everyday life, but do not correspond to usual reality. To varying degrees encoded, poetic, dark and/or even eerie, they elude being fixed in any unambiguous way.

Artists:
Francis Alÿs, Michael Buthe, Rupprecht Geiger, Harald Klingelhöller, Anna Oppermann, Louis Soutter, Angela Strassheim, Paul Thek

A trilingual catalogue (German, English, Dutch) will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.