The collections

Lyonel Feininger
Gelmeroda
1920
Woodcut
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

Information on the Dr Hermann Klumpp collection can be found here.

Conrad Felixmüller
Three Friends
1919
Woodcut
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

In addition to the unique holdings of Lyonel Feininger’s works, the gallery has a well-known permanent loan from the German Foundation for Monument Protection, featuring some 100 works by early German modernist artists such as Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel, Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, or the “Friedericus Rex” cycle by Lovis Corinth. This permanent loan gives Lyonel Feininger’s contemporaries a prominent place in the collection.

Lyonel Feininger
Yellow Village Church 3
1930
Wooden printing block
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

Thanks to funding by the state of Saxony-Anhalt, in 2014 the gallery succeeded in acquiring an original Feininger printing block. The “Yellow Village Church 3” was cut in 1930 and the image printed in 1931. The friends association had previously purchased one of these original prints and made it available to the gallery on permanent loan. The reprint entered the holdings as a gift from a Quedlinburg citizen. These three facets of one work form a unique ensemble of art history, at the same acting as a prime example of civic engagement for a museum. The triad is presented in the permanent Lyonel Feininger exhibition.

Lyonel Feininger
Rained off!
From: Das Narrenrad. Album fröhlicher Radfahr-Bilder [The Fool’s Wheel. Album of happy cycling pictures], published by “Das Narrenschiff”, Berlin 1898, p. 26
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

All of the association’s purchases for the Lyonel Feininger Gallery are on the inventory as permanent loans. As well as works by Feininger, they mainly consist in pieces by artists who have been commemorated in special exhibitions. The aim of the concept is to add examples from each presentation to the holdings so that the collection gradually becomes an archive of works reflecting the association’s public activities.

Lyonel Feininger
Thuringian Village (Mellingen)
1949
Oil on canvas
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

This painting is an important point of reference for Feininger’s late works, which are not represented in the Dr Hermann Klumpp collection.

Ludwig Rauch
Another Life, Wittstock
2002
Photograph on dibond aluminium shee

“Karl Völker Foundation”
Karl Völker
Demonstrations II
1924
Wooden printing bloc

The “Karl Völker Foundation” represents a significant increase in the holdings, consisting in printing blocks and etching plates by the artist Karl Völker (1889–1962), one of the most important early German Modernists in Saxony-Anhalt. The batch of more than 150 items was given to the gallery in 2014, and the endowment documented in an inventory catalogue. At the same time, this endowment gave the collection a new main focus, extending the term “prints” by including items in the collection from the preliminary, crafts-based stages of printing, such as printing blocks or etched plates.

Hiroyuki Masuyama
Morning Mist in the Mountains (in the style of Caspar David Friedrich, 1808)
2007
LED lightbox
Acquired by Kulturstiftung Sachsen-Anhalt in 2017

Hiroyuki Masuyama (*1968) makes references to works from art history, not only by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) but also by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). Masuyama took thousands of tiny photographs of the original locations, putting his “sketches” together on his computer to create perfect montages such as the work “Morning Mist in the Mountains”, purchased in 2017. The views, presented in light boxes, stand out against the painting on which they are based, giving them an additional dimension. They always originate in a journey to the places depicted in the paintings, making the contemporary and the bygone visible in the form of their different production methods. This merging of two levels of time and space underlines the fact that the only contemporary thing about art is the moment when it is contemplated.

The sculptor Sabina Grzimek (b. 1942) looks back on a career lasting more than 50 years. Her sculptures encompass all the classic genres, from portraits and small-scale sculptures to multi-figure ensembles in the urban environment, and have found their way into prominent collections.

What is less well known is that, alongside the sculptural aspects of her work, the artist has also developed an extensive body of printed and painted pieces. Whatever genre she turns to, her artistic thinking revolves around the question of what can be said about human beings using the means at an artist's disposal, when people are shaped by ideologies, excessive consumption and a disconnection from nature, and are drowning in a sea of images from popular culture. This existentialist approach has its roots in an understanding of Modernism that does not drop every last link to the world we see, and in fact takes the crisis in the representational approach to depicting the world as a subject of her works. The urge to nonetheless treat the human form as if it were indispensable stems from the conviction that industrialised society’s social distortion should not be allowed to penetrate to the very source of people’s human experience: their body. The human figure imagined in art can enable each individual to connect to their society’s particular relationship with the world. This is also at the heart of the sculptor’s prints.

For the exhibition “Sabina Grzimek. Time and Tide. Etchings and overpaintings”, held in the Feininger Gallery from 16 September 2017 to 9 January 2018, the artist donated all of the exhibited 129 works on paper to the gallery.