February 7–June 15, 2014
Opening: February 6, 8pm
Oktogon
Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden
Georg-Treu-Platz
D–01067 Dresden
Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–6pm
This year Dresdner Kunstakademie celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding. On February 6, 1764, the Duke of Saxony Prince Xavier signed the “deed founding the General Art Academy for Painting, the Art of Sculpture, Engraving, and Architecture,” making Dresden’s art academy one of the oldest art academies in Europe.
The central project in the framework of the program for the 250th anniversary of the founding of the art academy is the show geradezu momentan (virtually current) held at the school’s exhibition space, the Oktogon, curated by Matthias Flügge, Susanne Greinke, and Dietmar Rübel. Based on the core proposition that art schools are not museums, but above all sites of artistic practice, the exhibition is conceived from the perspective of creative process.
The exhibition is not about the school, but an exhibition with Dresden’s Hochschule für Bildende Künste, resulting in dialogs with the rich history of the institution in which today’s students engage with the academy as a historical location. The artworks and objects from the last 250 years send the visitors to the exhibition on an associative journey that breaks with classical chronologies and sequences of styles to show the necessity of spaces of artistic freedom beyond social norms.
The exhibition shows objects from the rich store of the school’s own collection and archives, complemented by loans from museums and private collections. A walk through the exhibition, conceived as an essay, reveals important moments of the school’s history. The exhibit includes artworks, documents, artifacts, and individual memories that reflect in their own way the rich universe of Dresden’s art academy. The exhibition thus approaches the institution from the margins, placing now unknown artists such as Rosina de Gasc, August Kotzsch, Kurt Goellner, and Sascha Schneider at the center of attention while at the same time featuring works by now prominent artists from their time spent as students in Dresden.
The show also looks at a little-regarded aspect of the institution’s history until now, the brief introduction of art training for women in 1800, alongside important debates inspired by the Dresden academy. These include debates about color in sculpture in the nineteenth century, the harsh social climate of the 1920s, and the influence that the art faculty had on Nazi art policy.
More recent history is reflected by looking at the aesthetic and political debates of the early GDR, especially the divergence between so-called “free” and applied art in the formalist debates of the period. The exhibition concludes with the actions held by students during the 1980s and the arrival of new faculty in the 1990s.
A bridge spans between history and the present with numerous student interventions that refer more or less explicitly to the historical exhibits. The exhibition was designed by Marten Schech, currently a student of Wilhelm Mundt. Sculpture and architecture in one, the exhibition design recalls the geometry of the original flooring destroyed during the war, and reinterpreting the historical space in a new way.
It is impossible to show 250 years in full completion. We seek not to present history and its heroes or the achievements of the present, but rather want to engage the visitors with a network of episodes that links now and then to create a kind of anthology including things both new and familiar. In so doing, we rely on collective memory, for the visitors will repeatedly think of those that they painfully miss. Each individual can recall their own Dresden heroes and allow the exhibition to complement the figures in their own imaginary museum. Fleeting and enduring, in any case “virtually current:”geradezu momentan.
Artists include:
Schenau, Giovanni Casanova, Gottfried Semper, Julius Scholtz, Robert Diez, Alexander “Sascha” Schneider, Otto Dix, Oskar Kokoschka, Hans Grundig, Richard Müller, Jürgen Böttcher/Strawalde, Gerhard Richter, Ralf Winkler/A. R. Penck/Mike Hammer, et al.
Kindly supported by Ostdeutsche Sparkassenstiftung, the Saxon State Ministry for Science and Art, the Freundeskreis der Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, and the state capital Dresden.
Press contact:
Andrea Weippert, Press Officer
Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden
Brühlsche Terrasse 1
01067 Dresden
PF 160 153
01287 Dresden
T + 49 0 351 49267 16
F + 49 0 351 49267 21
[email protected]
