RAVENSBURG.- What happens when the ideals of German Expressionism are examined from the vantage point of the present? At Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, an exhibition that opened on August 8 brings works from the museum’s Selinka Collection face to face with contemporary artists to explore how questions surrounding the body, gender, nature, consumption, war and cultural identity have changed—and how stubbornly some of them have endured.
On view through November 15, 2026, “Questions of Our Time: The Collection Meets the Present” (Zeitfragen. Sammlung trifft Gegenwart) pairs historical works with pieces by contemporary artists across six thematic groupings. The exhibition includes Kader Attia, Fiona Banner, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Otto Mueller, Edvard Munch, Daniel Richter, Ulrike Rosenbach, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Agnès Varda. It is curated by Kristina Groß.
The starting point is the museum's Selinka Collection, which concentrates on 20th-century art and German Expressionism. Rather than presenting Expressionism as a closed historical chapter, the exhibition asks what becomes visible when its ambitions, assumptions and contradictions are placed beside artistic practices of the late 20th and 21st centuries.
One section looks at the body through the work of Fiona Banner, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Early Expressionists challenged academic conventions by drawing friends and lovers quickly and informally, searching for an immediacy they associated with freedom and authenticity. Yet the museum also turns that history back on itself, asking who the models were, what power they had within those relationships and where the boundary lies between artistic observation and voyeurism.
Banner’s Mirror (2007) approaches the same territory through language. Actress Samantha Morton had posed nude in Banner's studio, but instead of drawing her, Banner described her body in words. In the documented performance, Morton reads that description publicly for the first time, making the vulnerability involved in being observed—and then represented—part of the work itself.
Questions of female identity are taken further through a pairing of Edvard Munch and Ulrike Rosenbach. Munch’s Madonna – Loving Woman brings together two deeply entrenched images of femininity: the sacred Madonna and the sexually independent femme fatale. Rosenbach confronts similarly inherited archetypes in her 1975 video work Don’t Believe I’m an Amazon. She merges her own face with the Madonna in Stefan Lochner’s Madonna of the Rose Bower before appearing as an Amazon and firing arrows at the image. The gesture becomes a pointed attack on the endurance of restrictive female stereotypes.
Elsewhere, Agnès Varda and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff are connected through the simple act of gathering what remains in a field. Schmidt-Rottluff’s Woman in the Field of 1919 presents a figure seemingly at one with the landscape. Varda's 2000 documentary Les glaneurs et la glaneuse transforms gleaning into a social and political question, following people who recover what consumer society has discarded. Moving from Jean-François Millet’s famous The Gleaners to farms, markets, streets and scrapyards, Varda considers the value of what is left behind and the possibility of gleaning as resistance to a throwaway culture.
The exhibition will present a one-time complete screening of Varda’s 82-minute film on October 22 at 6 p.m.
The imagined harmony between body and nature receives a darker contemporary counterpart in a dialogue between Otto Mueller and Daniel Richter. Mueller’s works evoke the Expressionists’ desire for freedom from industrial society through bodies situated in seemingly untouched landscapes. Richter’s nocturnal scenes, by contrast, place human figures in environments where nature and urban infrastructure have become almost impossible to separate. Water can suggest leisure or danger; figures may be swimming, fleeing or even lifeless. The idyllic relationship between humanity and nature has become unstable.
Perhaps the exhibition’s most direct encounter with the scars of history comes through Kader Attia and Erich Heckel. Attia’s wooden heads from Culture, Another Nature Repaired are based on photographs of soldiers disfigured during World War I. His longstanding investigation of “repair” contrasts a Western tendency to conceal evidence of injury with traditions in which damage may remain visible as part of an object's—or a person's—history.
Heckel experienced the war himself as a volunteer medical orderly in Flanders. His 1919 woodcut Portrait of a Man presents an inward-looking, hollow-faced figure stripped of heroic rhetoric. Placed together, the works made a century apart examine not only physical wounds but the question of whether healing requires erasing their traces.
The final section brings Małgorzata Mirga-Tas and Otto Mueller into a deliberately complicated conversation about representations of Roma and Sinti people. Mirga-Tas, who became the first Roma artist to represent a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022, constructs vibrant textile works from within her own community. Her collages draw on Roma history, family life, women and shared experience, often incorporating clothing, sheets and textiles belonging to members of that community.
Her Romani Kali Daj (2024), whose title can be translated as “Roma Madonna,” presents a mother and child with dignity and monumentality while consciously revisiting historical images created from outside Roma culture.
Mueller, by contrast, repeatedly represented Sinti and Roma people as part of an idealized vision of freedom, nature and life beyond conventional society. The exhibition does not dismiss those works, but subjects their romanticism to scrutiny, emphasizing the difference between an artist's projection and the lived realities of the people represented.
That willingness to interrogate rather than simply celebrate the collection is central to Questions of Our Time. The exhibition treats art history as something still capable of generating friction. Expressionism's search for freedom, authenticity and closeness to nature remains compelling, but the meanings of those concepts change when viewed alongside contemporary debates about gender, colonialism, representation, consumerism, environmental anxiety and the memory of war.
“Questions of Our Time: The Collection Meets the Present” is on view at Kunstmuseum Ravensburg through November 15, 2026.
