April 22–August 14, 2016
Celebrating the centenary of Dada art, the Kunsthalle Mannheim honours the revolutionary artist Hannah Höch with a retrospective focusing on her work after 1945.
Hannah Höch (1889–1978) is one of the most influential female artists in Germany. Her powerful and often emancipatory works link the Modern avant-garde period with the post-war years. Her art is saturated with the rebellious Dada-spirit. With her utopian and revolutionary potential, Höch inspired the young generation of artists in the 1960s.
The exhibition at The Kunsthalle Mannheim brings together some 150 works. The variety in styles and mediums is astonishing, thereby breaking up the corset of Höch as “Dada’s grande dame” into which art history forced this exceptional artist. Heterogeneity is a hallmark of this retrospective: “I want to erase fixed boundaries”, Höch states on the occasion of her first solo show in Den Haag. “Unrestrained freedom for Hannah Höch” she demands as early as 1919 in her collage “Dada-Rundschau,” thereby proclaiming her personal and artistic credo.
The exhibition features eight thematic galleries from figuration to abstraction with collages being omnipresent, the medium Höch introduced in 1918 and for which she is famous. The show begins with the big city life, set against the garden landscape, in which paradisiac plants and horrific vegetation sprawl—not to mention the ambivalent symbiosis of nature and technology in her seminal “Propeller thistles.” Höch’s keen interest in science led her to dedicate a collage to the men landing on the moon in 1969. She always was a keen observer of the world around her. The twelve years of Nazi-dictatorship Höch spent virtually isolated nevertheless commenting on the political situation with gripping works.
An then there is an abundance of works to discover exuding this particular cheerfulness and the subtle irony, that make Höch’s art such a pleasure to look at and decipher.
Visitors to the show can put their own abilities in collaging to the test—two galleries offer the unique opportunity to cut and paste on- and offline to create an ever changing public collage.
With Hannah Höch, the Kunsthalle Mannheim continues to show influential female artists of the 20th and 21st century—from Germaine Richier and Ré Soupeault to Magdalena Jetelová, Nairy Bagrhamian an Pipilotti Rist.
Hannah Höch. A revolutionary artist is curated by Dr. Inge Herold and Dr. Karoline Hille.
