BIELEFELD.- After the success of 1937. Perfection and Destruction, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld is once again examining a year that was a crucial turning point in history. Besides the student rebellions and the political uproar around the world, 1968 was about an anti-dictatorial impulse in art.

The exhibition will feature works that took stock of the world and documented its changes, by more than 150 artists from around the world. From Joseph Beuys to Andy Warhol, from Louise Bourgeois to Lawrence Weiner, 1968.

The Great Innocence presents innocently rendered corrections, demanded en masse, of the traditional system of art. Most of the artists encountered the time-honored genres of painting and sculpture with distrust. With the help of innovative materials and concepts, the artists wanted to break open the old museum structures and overcome the spatial hurdles.

Those in Land Art went to work in the landscape or desert towns. Performance artists moved their bodies in the process of questioning them. Minimal Art dispensed with manual art production, while the artists hired technicians to execute their works. Conceptual Art used numbers, letters, grids, information, and photographic sequences. A few artists wanted to be writers, philosophers, and scientists. Many of the new works were intended to lead to heightened perception, to new realms of consciousness. A certain political and moral irony could not be overlooked. The creative self was the focal point in 1968, and around it formed a new contemporary art culture. 1968.

The Great Innocence analyzes American, European, and Asian artists, as well as visionary architects, through approximately three hundred works.