Contemporary Art from the Lenbachhaus and the KiCo Foundation
The Lenbachhaus showcases works of contemporary art created between 1958 and the present. The earliest work in the exhibition is a painting by Maria Lassnig, who pursued a distinctive style of nonrepresentational art in the 1950s. Her intensely physical gestural approach anticipated tendencies in abstract expressionism. She later made art history with her innovative "body-consciousness painting," a practice in which she scrutinized her own body and questions of gender on the canvas. VALIE EXPORT and Friederike Pezold, who emerged as key voices in the feminist art discourse in the 1960s, rose to renown with radical performances, videos, and photographs. The artists themselves typically star in works that engage the public in debates around the female body and the male gaze. The Lenbachhaus very early on presented positions in feminist art in its exhibitions and acquired such works for its collection. In the 1970s, questions of gender equality and the relations between men and women were one concern in the work of the Canadian artists’ collective General Idea to which AA Bronson belonged; their focus subsequently shifted to the AIDS crisis. Launching their careers in the 1960s/70s, the photographers Barbara Klemm and Helga Paris documented the rapidly shifting political and social realities in a divided Germany. Personal and public identities, feminism and emancipation, family and neighborhood life are their protagonists. Cindy Sherman devised a personal and self-referential practice that nonetheless never lost sight of the social dimension, exploring her own body, questions of gender, and what she saw as the terrors of the construction of identity. A young artist who has staked out a contemporary position on identity formation, humanity, and sexuality is Tejal Shah; her work in the presentation made its public debut at documenta 13 in 2012.
