September 13, 2009 to January 10, 2010
MKM Museum Küppersmühle for Modern Art

The Museum Küppersmühle is showing an extensive exhibition of works by the artist Gerhard Hoehme (1920-1989), which brings together paintings, objects and sculptures from the years 1955-1989. The exhibition is part of an extensive exhibition cooperation with the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Foundation in Duisburg and the museum kunst palast in Düsseldorf. Under the joint title “die Unruhe wächst” (unrest grows), the three museums are paying tribute to the broad spectrum of Gerhard Hoehme’s artistic work.

The realization of three simultaneous exhibitions with different focal points makes it possible for the first time to present the different facets of Hoehme’s multifaceted work in detail and to present the artist in such a comprehensive way: Hoehme as an informal and experimentalist, as a painter and graphic artist, as a creator of sculptural works, as an academy professor, teacher and theorist. “Hoehme was a key pioneer of the Informel movement in the 1950s,” says director Walter Smerling, “and also played an important role for the avant-garde. He was a great artist and a great teacher who congenially combined both qualities and unfortunately died far too early. The alliance of three museums is an excellent opportunity to pay tribute to him and his art.”

The exhibition of works from 1955-1989 shows the enormous diversity of the artist Gerhard Hoehme. He is one of the pioneers of German Art Informel, but developed the informal pictorial concepts further at an early stage, eventually breaking away from them and pursuing his own experimental paths. Nevertheless, his work always remains ambiguous: “If you look at the phases of his work in chronological order,” says Susanne Rennert, “it becomes clear how decisively the artist broke out of the fixed coordinate system of art at times – but then accepted it again.” For her, the interesting thing about Hoehme’s work lies precisely in its ambivalence: “The experimental, the “modern” and the conventional are sometimes extremely opposed to each other here. Hoehme, always busy exploring new, unknown artistic terrain, simultaneously cultivated classical painting with great, almost old-fashioned passion.”