March 24 – August 6, 2023
Last year, the painter Ernst Wilhelm Nay would have been 120 years old.
To mark the occasion, the MKM Museum Küppersmühle is showing a comprehensive, retrospective exhibition at
with works from all
five decades of his artistic career. Nay is still a
famous protagonist of German post-war modernism. His formal
abstraction asserted itself parallel to Art Informel. His early representational paintings, influenced by late
Expressionism, form the
basis for Nay’s later abstract work, which is characterized by a powerfully dynamic
autonomy of free colour forms.
The exhibition at the MKM presents around 70 paintings covering all creative phases of
Nay’s oeuvre. Beginning with his late paintings, the retrospective
leads back chronologically through the stylistically and thematically different stages
of his work. Depending on when they were created, Nay’s works fascinate with their
intense color-form interaction, their surface-space composition or figure-ground
correlation. Starting from figurative painting, the artist developed an
increasingly abstract formal language that refers back to his early work.
“The tensions, the energies of the surface, the color, from color to surface, led to
completely different new pictorial concepts, the song, the dance of the surface, if you will.”
E.W. NAY, REGESTEN ZU LEBEN UND WERK, 1958
Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902 – 1968) is one of the most important painters of the 20th century.
Even as a young artist around 1930, he had already gained recognition in the art world
, was represented in important exhibitions and received his first prizes. With
his participation in the documenta in Kassel in 1955, 1959 and 1964 as well as the biennials
in São Paulo and Venice, he established himself as a permanent fixture in the art of
modernism. At the MKM, his work can be seen in the context of the work of his contemporaries at
: The new museum extension houses the most comprehensive international collection of
German post-war art with exemplary works from neighboring
European countries. For the first time in 20 years, Ernst Wilhelm Nay is now being honored with a comprehensive retrospective at
.
An exhibition of the Hamburger Kunsthalle in cooperation with the Ernst Wilhelm
Nay Foundationthe Museum Wiesbaden and the Museum Küppersmühle for Modern
Art, Duisburg.
Click here for the accompanying program.
