UPCOMING

Gustave Courbet’s radical visual language, his sociopolitical aspirations and his influence on modern art remain as powerful today as ever. He rejected the idealised aesthetics of classicism and romanticism, making the lives of ordinary people and reality the subject of his paintings instead. With his uncompromising attitude and innovative painting technique, Courbet is considered a pioneer of modernism – a boundary breaker …

The experimental years of non-representational photography were marked by debates and position statements articulated by a young generation. After Gottfried Jäger discovered the book Kunst und Konstruktion (Art and Construction) by computer pioneer and science fiction author Herbert W. Franke in 1958, an artistic exchange developed over the course of decades.

The exhibition shows a selection of works by graduates of the master’s degree programme Photography Studies & Practice at the Folkwang University of the Arts. The two Folkwang institutions are thus continuing a collaboration that began in 2016 with the Stopover series.

For the first time, an exhibition is dedicated to the former “Department of Islamic Arts” at Museum Folkwang and its resonance in the modern Folkwang cosmos. Even before acquiring important paintings by Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh, museum founder Karl Ernst Osthaus collected arts and crafts from North Africa and West Asia. This group of works had a decisive influence on the Folkwang concept and influenced the art …