News from Berlin

The Transience of Material Things through Several Perspectives

August 13th, 2014
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News from Berlin - The Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin has the honour to present a great exhibition of artworks ranging from the 1960s until today. The idea behind the exhibition is to express the transience of contemporary sculptures.

The collective exhibition ‘Vanitas. Ewig ist eh nichts’ (‘Emptiness. Eternal is nothing’) puts together a total of twenty pieces of art from 16 different artists, who strived to express the finiteness of things. Therefore, one visiting the exhibition would see things ranging from perishable materials to the aesthetics of chaos and collapse. Some of the artists included are Dieter Roth, Thomas Schütte, Alicja Kwade, Mona Hatoum and Tomás Saraceno.

In Latin, Vanitas means vanity or emptiness. Although it was only a very important art concept in the seventeenth century, when the classic symbols of the baroque style emerged, the idea of vanitas has played a key role up until the 1960s. In this time period, the baroque symbols of Vanitas were used to express the transience of the material thing.

This is the first exhaustive exhibition on this topic in the contemporary age. The director of the Georg Kolbe Museum, Julia Wallner, pointed out that the museum’s new program tries to raise the question of why the baroque has lost its current character. The idea is that the visitor can actually feel the changes occurring in the artistic perspective throughout time. This exhibition is sponsored by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and will be on display until the end of August, daily from 10.00 until 18.00.

Some examples of works to be found in the exhibition are “The Dance of Death”, situated in a teenager’s room, by James Hopkins; Taylor-Johnosns’s movie “A Little Death”; and the self-portraits of Thomas Schütte. In addition, the “New Poetry of the Collapse” by the artist Tomás Saraceno is also on display.

 

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