Past exhibitions in the art museum
Review

Margarete and Oskar Moll and Mathilde and Hans Purrmann were important catalysts of the European avant-garde. In Berlin, the two couples were part of the movement shortly after 1900, when German Impressionism grew increasingly expressive, and together they founded the well-attended Académie Matisse in Paris in 1908.

“On the essence of nature” presents a remarkable private collection, presented for the first time in its own exhibition. For 25 years now, the Bremen doctor of microbiology has been collecting art of the 19th and 20th centuries, but also individual positions of contemporary art. His main focus is on European landscape painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as highlights of still life painting, in which the hommage to beauty and the knowledge of transience come together in a contemplative moment.

Opulent robes, filigree works of art created solely from recycled materials. A surprising exhibition whose beautiful appearance is characterised by sustainability.

The exhibition and accompanying scholarly publication provide the first extensive study dedicated to all the works in the Nationalgalerie produced by women painters and sculptors before 1919. It is a revision of the museum’s collections viewed under the important aspect of current discourse about equal rights.

The exhibition focuses on art in public space, as well as on Neu-Ulm as a city where a variety of experiences take place. “Outdoor Spaces – Inside Views” thus brings the outside inside the museum.

In less than two decades, Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876-1923) created a powerful oeuvre that includes paintings, woodcuts and glass works. Rhythmic compositions of pictorial space, black outlines and an intensive use of colour characterise the Dutch artist’s expressive landscape, city and harbour motifs.

In his photo series “Where Children Sleep”, James Mollison shows sleeping places of children from all over the world. He juxtaposes them with portraits of the girls and boys who live in them, from places such as Brazil, China, India, Israel, Mexico, Nepal, Senegal, and the United States.

The exhibition focuses on the lives and works of two expressionist artists who are linked by a special friendship.

The exhibition presents one of the famous sculptress of the 1920s: She was said to be the face of the Weimar Republic and with her bobbed hair an idol of the “new woman”. With her small animal sculptures and her formal language, characterised by an impressionistic flicker of the surface design, she gains a reputation on a national and international level.

In the last twenty years, works by Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen were always among the most impressive pictures in the special exhibitions shown at the Edwin Scharff Museum. The exhibition “Flächenbrand Expressionismus” (“Conflagration Expressionism”) included a glimpse into Emil Maetzel’s work.