Love, Grief, Time

An Exhibition on Melancholy and Eros in Contemporary Art, the Murken Collection

Melancholy and Eros, as two fundamental states of human existence, are the focus of this special exhibition, on view at the Kunstmuseum Thun from July 16 to August 30, 1998, which Axel and Christa Murken have curated from their art collection. The Aachen-based collector couple has focused on the art of their time, highlighting works that reflect their personal interest in humanity, shaped by art and medical history. The art-historical context for this focus of their collection is the renewed turn by many artists toward the figurative and the human since the 1960s, following a period in which postwar Western art was largely dominated by abstraction and Informel.

Through the lens of contemporary art from 1965 to the present, the exhibition explores the traditions and ruptures of an age-old theme that has inspired artists and writers for centuries: A profound longing for wholeness and the painful anguish of being aware of one’s own limitations are expressed in diverse ways across the approximately 80 works by 40 artists (paintings, prints, photographs, objects, installations). Some of the artistic positions represented are deliberately juxtaposed in their contrast. Thus, the artificially constructed, doll-like figures of Hans Bellmer and Karl Heidelbach—highly artificial appropriations of the female body through a solitary male gaze—form a kind of counterpoint to Joseph Beuys’s artistic concept. It was precisely from suffering, from experiences of the limits of existence and death, that Beuys developed, within his symbolic “realism”—always oriented toward the material—that spiritual warmth of action which one might also call love, and which became his ultimate artistic driving force. Works by Hans Bellmer, along with a group of objects and drawings by Joseph Beuys, together with works by Ronald B. Kitai, form a body of work rooted in the 1960s and 1970s with a graphic focus.

A large number of large-format paintings from the late 1970s and 1980s reflect the state of a generation that, precisely at a time of seemingly greatest sexual freedom, is tormented by existential fears, loneliness, and coldness (including works by Helmut Middendorf, Salomé, and Norbert Tadeusz). In some cases, the inspiring creative power of Eros is dampened by almost obsessive, often sexually charged images that ultimately, however, reflect a mourning for the loss of the “you.” Some artists, including Dieter Krieg and Hermann Nitsch, pit their own unconditional artistic Eros against the world of fears by formulating their images with painterly vehemence. Others, such as Milan Kunc, adopt an ironically playful approach to major themes and traditions. Many icons of male fantasies and idealized images, sometimes presented with the garish vocabulary of Pop Art, turn out upon closer inspection to be shadows of transience, as the moment of bliss is perceived in the awareness of its fleeting nature (Hermann Albert, Gerhard Richter, Bob Stanley).

In the context of art education, perceived closeness gives way to distance, as seen in the photo installation by the Japanese artist Noritoshi Hirakawa or the “Compositions trouvées” by the Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl. The exhibition owes a series of particularly powerful works to artists such as Maria Lassnig and Elke Krystufek, who counter the archetype of the contemplative, melancholic male artist (as seen in the work of Mimmo Germana, for example) with the female experience of the body in its vulnerability, its peril, and its enigmatic nature. From entirely opposite directions, two female photographers seek images of human life: loneliness and intimate closeness define the familiar images from the circle of friends of the American photographer Nan Goldin, while Judith Samen’s compositions feature a sensitive, almost symbolic self-staging of the feminine. Conceived as a traveling exhibition, “Melancholy and Eros in Contemporary Art” has already been shown at the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen and at the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal (Kunsthalle Barmen).