Against the Grain. Prints of the Günther and Annemarie Gercken Foundation
24 February 2023GDS 2
From 3 March to 4 June 2023, the Kupferstich-Kabinett, run by Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD), will be holding the exhibition “Against the Grain. Prints of the Günther and Annemarie Gercken Foundation” in its exhibition rooms on the third floor of Dresden’s Residenzschloss. The display will feature some 150 works by 17 artists, ranging from classic modernism to the present.
Günther and Annemarie Gercken have been collecting outstanding contemporary art for 70 years. In building their collection, they have displayed unremitting passion, an unerring instinct for quality and a constant readiness to engage intensely with contemporary artistic genres. Their main interest is in how artists get to grips with human beings, their essential abilities and the abyssal depths of their souls. Over the years, it has become a central feature of Günther and Annemarie Gercken’s approach to art to seek inspiration in art that is discomforting, to critically re-appraise habitual perspectives and to think “against the grain”. The collection includes paintings, sculptures and drawings, but it is prints that take pride of place.
In 2016, most of this private collection was transferred to a charitable foundation based at the SKD. That same year, it was presented at the Albertinum’s exhibition “Sehgründe” (roughly: “Visual Depths”). Five years later, when the pandemic was underway in 2021, some additional works on paper were endowed. These are a lasting bonus for the publicly accessible collection at the Kupferstich-Kabinett, which was amassed over the centuries and has always included contemporary times in its field of vision. The works also offer the SKD attractive opportunities for research and learning.
Now, the Kupferstich-Kabinett is paying tribute to Günther und Annemarie Gercken’s lifelong dedication to art in an exhibition. Combining a selection of the contemporary masterpieces they donated with a group of outstanding prints by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Edvard Munch that remain in their collection, the exhibition extends from classic modernism to the 1960s and on into the 21st century.
Classic printmaking techniques are celebrated in radical images: woodcuts by Georg Baselitz, Werner Büttner, Hubert Kiecol, Anselm Kiefer, Gustav Kluge and Carsten Nicolai, etchings by Horst Antes, Georg Baselitz, David Hockney, Wilhelm Lehmbruck and A. R. Penck, and lithographs by Robert Mangold and Hermann Nitsch. Other highlights include a sculptural relief drawing by Monika Grzymala, a heavily political group of works about torture by Jenny Holzer, and Tomas Schmit’s perceptive drawings.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a varied learning and education programme. This will be supplemented by curatorial tours, plus discussions on art with the writer Marcel Beyer on 19 April and the artist Monika Grzymala on 10 May. A public presentation on current trends in printmaking will be held on 24 May by Dr Jenny Graser, who curates the collection of drawings and prints run by Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Our regular live speakers will answer museumgoers’ questions on eight Saturdays (11.3, 1.4, 15.4, 29.4, 6.5, 13.5, 27.5, 3.6).
A richly illustrated 200-page exhibition catalogue is to be published in German by Sandstein-Verlag, Dresden, featuring contributions by the Georg Büchner Prize winner Marcel Beyer, as well as Björn Egging and Günther Gercken. € 38 (museum price: € 28), ISBN: 978-3-95498-739-9.
