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Exhibition

Reading in art
Reading in art
Picture: Armand Guillaumin, reader, undated, pastel, 48 x 41 cm, privately owned
28. September 2019 - 15. December 2019

Reading in art

Reading pictures - Picture reading

As early as the 1920s, Walter Benjamin formulated the nowadays widespread fear that the book was dead, and that this was the end of a cultural epoch to which the present could only oppose dissipation and superficiality. In fact, the concentration and inner calm required for reading seems almost impossible in the digital era, and the book is being replaced by new media.

 Curated by Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy, the exhibition "Reading in Art. Reading Pictures - Picture Reading" takes a look back into the golden era of reading, in which the book was still a constant companion and available in every situation. The show tries to portray what reading means and what fascinated the painters with the subject of reading women and men. For this purpose not only pictures, but also literary texts, which analyze the phenomenon "reading", will be presented. Writers and philosophers describe reading as a creative act that individually recreates and shapes the world invented in the text. In this sense, the representations of the readers are determined by their absorption into the text, by a fascination with the book, which corresponds to the fixation of the painter on his motif.

 Adolph Menzel, Max Liebermann, Auguste Renoir, Lovis Corinth, Pablo Picasso, Erich Heckel, August Macke, Max Beckmann, Albert Marquet and many others have painted readers. Their pictures exert a special attraction on the viewer, because the painters grasp the state of the "controlled reverie" of the reader with ever new pictorial means. They show on the one hand the individual since the epoch of the Enlightenment in increasing intellectual independence, on the other hand the intimacy and privacy constituted in the act of reading as a privileged, protected space.

 However, the exhibition is not just about pictures of reading, it is also about reading pictures that use letters as formal elements of abstract or representational depiction, or that combine the gesture of writing with that of drawing, painting or scribbling. With works by Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Jacques Villeglé, Grisha Bruskin, Ivan Chuikov, Svetlana Kopystiansky, Beate Passow or William Kentridge, the question of how reading works is examined: How do words and meaning, signs and designations add up to the vision that cast a spell over the reader? When looking at these works, it becomes certainty that the deciphering of letters and the understanding of words are not enough and that the essential is between the lines.

Half of the around 50 works on display belong to the ahlers collection. The other half are loans from museums and private collections. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue which is available at the Stiftung Ahlers Pro Arte.

 

Two evening events will supplement the exhibition (registration required): 

On November 15, Joachim Sartorius, diplomat, poet and publisher of well-respected international anthologies, such as "Atlas of New Poetry", talks about reading. His first exercise book, which he filled with characters, is one of the exhibits in the exhibition. 

On December 6, a reading with complementary music program will take place. The actor Raphael Dwinger reads texts by Kurt Tucholsky, Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, Ingeborg Bachmann and others. The Hanoverian violinist and violist Elisabeth Kufferath plays pieces of music of the 20th century.

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