KARL FRED DAHMEN. The Landscape Principle
September 22 – November 5, 2017

MKM Museum Küppersmühle for Modern Art, Duisburg

Karl Fred Dahmen is the great unknown among the pioneers of German post-war art. The painter and object artist, one of the defining figures of German Art Informel, would have been one hundred years old in 2017. To mark the occasion, the MKM and the Leopold Hoesch Museum are presenting the most comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work to date. On display are paintings, collages, object boxes, installations and graphic works with which the Documenta participant Dahmen pursued a fundamental new artistic beginning after the caesura caused by the Third Reich. Dahmen always saw “abstraction as a world language” as an experiment with an open outcome and created an enormously varied oeuvre, which the exhibition presents in a wide range.

Biographical information
Karl Fred Dahmen was born in Stolberg near Aachen in 1917. In 1931, he began his training at the School of Arts and Crafts in Aachen, as a student of Kurt Schwitters, among others. After the school closed in 1933, he became a commercial artist. After the war, Dahmen began studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, which he soon abandoned. He established close contacts with the Paris art scene and co-founded the Düsseldorf “Gruppe 53”. In 1957, he joined the Deutscher Künstlerbund and in 1959 received the first international art prize for abstract painting in Lausanne. In 1967, Dahmen became a professor at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and left the Rhineland. His students included Günther Förg. Dahmen died in Preinersdorf/Chiemgau in 1981.

The Museum Küppersmühle is delighted to have the support of Sal. Oppenheim Privatbank and Deutsche Oppenheim Family Office AG

In cooperation with the Leopold Hoesch Museum, Düren
Duration Düren: 24.09.-26.11.2017

The exhibition is curated by Ina Hesselmann and Thomas Weber