DUSSELDORF, GERMANY.- K20 Kunstsammlung am Grabbeplatz presents Bernhard Heisig - The Rage of Pictures, on view through September 25, 2005. What is the “Rage of Pictures” to which the artist refers in his chosen exhibition title? Does he mean the furor unleashed by the motifs of his compositions? Alongside the events of the Paris Commune, the artist deals in his manifold and teeming pictures primarily with fascist atrocities and with the horrors and suf-ferings of World War II, albeit without ever arriving at any de-finitive conclusion.

When recognizing violence and terror, blindness and insanity, the grotesque and the macabre in these images, we may indeed be-come outraged. For Heisig’s images often tell of the monstrous rupture in civilized existence that so profoundly shaped recent German history. We might become outraged at the monolithic sys-tem of blind irrationality that brought incalculable misery to Heisig’s own country, to Europe, and to the world, and over col-lective failures to prevent such a global catastrophe. We might feel an understandable and almost inevitable fury against the perpetrators and against their countless collaborators who cloaked themselves in silent passivity, a rage, meanwhile, that is displaced by sadness and shame when we remember the victims.

At the center of Heisig’s work stands his confrontation with his own wartime traumas, including his personal actions and his re-sponsibility as both perpetrator and sufferer. Heisig does not focus exclusively on his own recollections, instead setting these within a larger historical framework. Alongside the Paris Commune, he thematizes the history of Prussia, returning repeat-edly to the figure of Frederick the Great. The most diverse set-tings (the artist’s studio, the Breslau fortifications, burning cities, battlefields) are superimposed and fused with events oc-curring at widely disparate points in time. In the process, sub-jects are condensed and perpetually recombined, so that many of the larger compositions exist in several variants. Heisig is simultaneously creator and suffering inhabitant of a world of experience whose seeming incomprehensibility renders it unsus-ceptible to any final artistic visualization. For Heisig, painting is the most important medium in a search for truth, a search in which the intimately personal view transcends its merely auto-biographical significance, lending expression to the universally valid. The few landscapes and portraits in our selection also underline Heisig’s powers of psychological penetration while disclosing the sensitive manner of a painter who extends the great tradition of Dix and Kokoschka, and especially of Beck-mann. A broad motivic framework and certain eminently painterly qualities combine to make this oeuvre so captivating. Sixty years after the end of World War II, and on the occasion of Bernhard Heisig’s 80th birthday, it seemed only fitting to offer a cross section of the extraordinary life’s work of an artist who has struggled with the German trauma so suggestively and with such artistic sovereignty.

The exhibition features an exemplary selection of the artist’s most important paintings and graphics. The installation is grouped around thematic foci (studio image, self-portrait, fas-cist nightmare, Prussian danse macabre, “world landscapes” and “world pictures”, panoramas of memory, depictions of his mother, etc.) which simultaneously respect chronology to the degree pos-sible given spatial relationships within the Kunstsammlung.

Eckhart Gillen, who has repeatedly received notice in recent years for distinguished exhibition projects (for example his “Deutschlandbilder” of 1997), has been intensively occupied with the oeuvre of this painter for some time. It seemed logical to entrust him with the selection of works, but also in part with the organization of the exhibition, timed to coincide with Bern-hard Heisig’s 80th birthday. The Düsseldorf version of the show is more comprehensive than the Leipzig one, and in order to elaborate on certain thematic contexts more explicitly, several works will be on display that are not listed in the catalog. Al-together, approximately 70 paintings and 50 graphic works will be on view in Düsseldorf.

This exhibition — which was conceived by Eckhart Gillen and or-ganized with his assistance and with support from Bernhard He-isig and from Dieter Brusberg and Leipzig’s Museum of Fine Arts — has its second venue at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. Finally, it will be on view between October 22, 2005 and January 30, 2006 at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie.

The exhibition catalog was edited by Eckhart Gillen in collabo-ration with the Museumspädagogischer Dienst Berlin. It contains contributions by Eduard Beaucamp, April Eisman, Eckhart Gillen, Tino Heim, Sabine Heinke, Paul Kaiser, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Dietulf Sander, and will be available in the museum shop for € 24.

Funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes:
Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig
K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Düsseldorf
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

Notable contributions from Altana AG Bad Homburg and the Saxony Cultural Foundation were aimed primarily at making possible the Leipzig venue of this project, while also indirectly benefiting the Düsseldorf presentation as well.