Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to announce the group show True Stories. A Show Related to an Era – The Eighties, curated by Peter Pakesch. The show includes works by Mirosław Bałka, Herbert Brandl, Werner Büttner, Clegg & Guttmann, Mathis Esterhazy, Günther Förg, Isa Genzken, Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Georg Herold, Axel Hütte, Cristina Iglesias, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Liz Larner, Zoe Leonard, Inge Mahn, Meuser, Reinhard Mucha, Cady Noland, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Richard Prince, Didi Sattmann, Julian Schnabel, Wilhelm Schürmann, Cindy Sherman, Mariella Simoni, Thomas Struth, Rosemarie Trockel, Franz West, Terry Winters, Christopher Wool, Otto Zitko, Heimo Zobernig and will take place both at Goethestraße 2/3 and our temporary space at Kurfürstendamm 213.
Seen from today’s perspective, during this decade, the way art would function in society has changed largely. Within the history of the late 20th Century, the very two years 1968 and 1989 are truly significant for politics as well as for culture. One signifies the height of the Cold War and the departure to new freedoms, the other one the end of this Cold War and the dawn of a new world order (that still is not in place yet).
In a certain reading of Western culture, visual art, as well as other fields of the cultural domain, have come to a certain end by the 1960ties - the end of the Modern. Aesthetics and politics went alongside with this verdict. After some confusion, some years later, artists on both sides of the Atlantic would get a lot of satisfaction by acting against all consequences of history. The end of the ‘End of Art’ around 1980 was experienced as a liberation at least as strong as the move to freedom more than a decade before. The world was to change in an unexpected way. The artist as a strong individual in a world where an individual identity has been revealed as obsolete: that contradiction became enormously productive, creating new strategies and attitudes for artistic challenges.
The exhibition intends to present significant positions of that time and how they were shown in galleries between New York and Los Angeles on one side, as well as Cologne and Vienna on the other side. Those four cities of intellectual importance experienced a growing exchange during that period.
Having always been in the focus of post-war art as the supreme centre where things would ‘happen’, New York looked more and more to Cologne, Germany’s centre of the artistic production and discourse, of the gallery world and collecting. This glance was returned with even larger intensity, as American and German attention would also drift further down east to the long dormant capital Vienna, which started to move out of the shadow of the Iron Curtain, in anticipation of the overthrow that changed the world at the end of the decade. The regard would also point further west in the direction of California, mainly to Los Angeles, which became more and more an important contributor, independent from New York and very specific in its way to deal with either the American as well as the European opposites.
Thus the show would link the American centers, Los Angeles in the West and New York in the East, with the two European hotspots Cologne and Vienna, trying to understand and to demonstrate what was new and what would prove to be revolutionary for the way art developed in the future decades leading into the 21st century.
– Peter Pakesch, 2018
At the same time, we present our first solo exhibition with new paintings by Louise Bonnet at Bleibtreustraße 45.
Peter Pakesch
Since 2015, Peter Pakesch acts as a chairman of the Maria Lassnig Foundation. From 1981 until 1993 he ran Galerie Peter Pakesch in Vienna where he showed Albert Oehlen, Günther Förg, Mike Kelley, Franz West, Herbert Brandl and Heimo Zobernig, among others. 1996 he became director of Kunsthalle Basel and in 2003 took over as director at the Universalmuseum Joanneum and Kunsthaus Graz until 2015.
Further exhibitions, events and fair participations:
Louise Bonnet
14 September – 27 October 2018
Opening: 14 September, 6-9 pm
Bleibtreustraße 45, 10623 Berlin
FRIEZE London
3 – 7 October 2018
Albert Oehlen
13 October – 21 December 2018
Opening: 13 October, 6-8 pm
57, rue du Temple 75004 Paris
FIAC Paris
18 – 21 October 2018
Press contact:
Galerie Max Hetzler
presse@maxhetzler.com
Berlin: +49 30 346 497 85-0
Paris: +33 1 57 40 60 80
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