BERLIN.- This comprehensive exhibition gives new and little-known insights into the important life’s work of the Berlin-based artist. Following Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Projects 1963–2020, PalaisPopulaire is now showing another monographic exhibition with a strong reference to Berlin.
“Berlin has been the home of K.H. Hödicke since 1957 and the city that has shaped and inspired his work for decades,” says Svenja von Reichenbach, director of the PalaisPopulaire. “The exhibition promises to introduce a completely different Hödicke, the likes of which has never been seen before. We are very pleased to be able to exhibit this extraordinary artist here, an artist whose work surprises us again and again in its diversity and boldness.”
Born in 1938, Karl Horst Hödicke is considered a pioneer of German Neo-Expressive postwar painting. As a professor at the West Berlin University of the Arts, he left his mark on an entire generation of subsequent artists who caused a sensation in the 1980s as the “Neue Wilde.” The retrospective exhibition K.H. Hödicke, previously on view at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, documents with drawings, paintings, and sculptures the extraordinary career of an inventive painter and artist who in the early 1960s rebelled against the then prevailing abstract currents of Informel and Tachism with a new, expressive kind of figuration and fresh pictorial worlds.
“The exhibition K.H. Hödicke is an homage to the unique city of Berlin, which has lost none of its attraction for individualists, visionaries, and daydreamers to this day. At the same time, it bows before one of the leading artistic personalities and outstanding painterly positions of this generation, who was to have a decisive influence on the international reputation of a new German painting since the 1960s,” says Michael Hering, director of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Munich and curator of the exhibition. For the first time, K.H. Hödicke gave a curator the opportunity to view the works in the artist’s possession over a period of two years and to organize them thematically and in groups of works. The works have now returned to Berlin, where Hödicke, together with Markus Lüpertz and Bernd Koberling, founded one of the first producer galleries in 1964, the legendary Großgörschen 35. More than almost any other artist, for decades Hödicke captured walled West Berlin, the ruins, the courtyards, the nighttime streets, the neon signs, the snow—and again and again the nervous energy and attitude to life of this frontline city, whose culture he has decisively influenced with his art.
In addition to the Berlin Suite, the exhibition also shows the Reflexionen/Spiegelungen executed between the late 1960s and early 1970s, with which Hödicke “wanted to catch the fleeting impressions of the big city in my painting and, yet, not pin them down.” Other sections are devoted to his criticalconstructive examination of Tachism, to his paintings on paper, to his Pan series, and to his diary-like Din A4 drawings, which were created between 1967 and 1977.
Accompanying the exhibition, the PalaisPopulaire is showing the films on Hödicke every hour in the Atelier: K.H. Hödicke. Eine Vernissage in filmischen Bildern (A Vernissage in Cinematic Images, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Munich, 2020) and Hödicke – Gobi (Helmut Wietz, 1999).
In parallel, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König has published a two-volume catalog with 370 full-page color illustrations for a price of 180 euros and a special edition that costs 280 euros (volume 1: K.H. Hödicke. Din A4, 364 pages, foreword and essay by Michael Hering as well as a biography and a list of exhibitions; volume 2: K.H. Hödicke. Mixed Media, 400 pages, foreword by Michael Hering and 100 aphorisms, maxims, and quotations from K.H. Hödicke).
