Past exhibitions in the art museum
Review

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.

The Edwin Scharff Museum dedicates this exhibition to the topic of the sensitive men in modern sculpture by presenting around 60 sculptures by Adolf von Hildebrand, George Minne, Hermann Blumenthal, Georg Kolbe, Gerhard Marcks and many other artists.

“He was the first among Hamburg’s artists, the pride of our new university,” the Senator for Culture formulated in 1955 in his funeral speech for Edwin Scharff. He therefore named the State Prize for artists situated in Hamburg, which was donated in the same year, after the revered sculptor who had headed the sculpture class after the Second World War.