The latest offering at Vero Beach Museum of Art fills three of its exhibition spaces, the Stark Rotunda and the Holmes and Titelman galleries, with an impressive show the likes of which has not been seen before in this city.
That is because “Made in Germany: Art since 1980” was curated by VBMA director Brady Roberts from the famous Rubell Family Collection of Miami. Comprising mainly paintings – several of them of ambitious size – photographic print, and four sculptures, the exhibition is a look at the art of Germany from just before the fall of the Berlin wall to the first decade of the present century. Because it is on view through Jan. 6, 2019, there is no excuse for not catching this exhibition.
When Roberts was chief curator at the Milwaukee Museum of Art, he worked with collectors Don and Mera Rubell to bring a portion of their 7,500-piece collection to that institution. The Rubells began collecting art – specifically, cutting-edge works by emerging artists – in New York City in the 1960s. Since 1993 they have shared exhibitions from their vast holdings with the public in a large building they own in Miami’s Wynwood business district. Next year the couple will move the collection from its present location to a 2 ½-acre property just a few miles away in Miami’s Allapattah District.
Vero is not that far from Miami, and many of our art-loving residents have made the pilgrimage to see the Rubell Collection in situ. After Roberts moved here to assume the VBMA’s directorship, the Rubells were not far from his mind.
“When I came here and saw some holes in our exhibition schedule, I called them up,” he says.
With so much to choose from in the Rubell Collection, why specifically German art?
In the mid-1980s Roberts, then a Bachelor of Arts candidate at the University of Illinois, spent his final semester of study in Vienna, Austria. He took that opportunity to travel in Europe, visiting Germany when it was still a divided state. More than a dozen years later Roberts, then curator at the Phoenix Art Museum, visited a reunified Germany in preparation for that museum’s 2006 exhibition, “Constructing New Berlin.”
It was also in the mid-1980s that the Rubells turned their attention to collecting German art. They began by purchasing pieces from galleries in Cologne and Dusseldorf, and later added a significant number of works by Leipzig artists to their trove after 1989, the year the Berlin Wall crumbled.
Says Roberts, “The Rubells and I knew a lot of the same artists and had a lot of the same interests. I asked them if we could do the ‘Made in Germany’ exhibition that San Antonio’s McNay Museum had presented from their collection in 2016.”
After receiving their assent to bring the exhibition to Vero Beach, Roberts, evidently not wanting to offer exactly the same show that Texas had enjoyed, proposed that “we change up the checklist a little bit.”
Conceivably amused by Roberts’ “ask for an inch, take a yard” strategy, the Rubells responded by sending him images of all 500 German works in their collection from which to select the Vero show.
“They are very generous people,” Roberts says.
Upon entering the museum, the first glimpse of the show is an 8-foot-high bronze figural sculpture that glitters like gold in the Stark Rotunda. Titled “Grösse Geister (Big Ghost) #2,” it was created by artist Thomas Schütte, who lives and works in Düsseldorf.
Roberts is quick to explain that the sculpture’s title does not refer to “things that go bump in the night.” And, although the figure has the flaccid form of a deflated Michelin man, he says this “ghost” refers to the spiritual nature of art.
As in English, “geist” can denote a spooky apparition; it can also refer to the concept of “spirit” or “essence.” The word got its start as a philosophical term the early 19th century with Hegel’s treatise “Phänomenologie des Geistes” (The Phenomenology of Spirit). The word eventually found its way into discussions of the cultural arts right up to World War I. After that catastrophe, Germans had little time for such ponderings.
Heading into the Holmes Gallery, Roberts notes that “there is a geography and a history in this show.”
Most of the artworks on display there are the creations of Berlin and Leipzig-based artists, he says.
“There are also different generations of artists on display. Some of them were children when the wall came down, and have no memory of a divided Germany. Others lived their early adulthood in communist Germany, which is very much part of their psychological make up,” says Roberts.
Time, place and circumstance are the factors that make this exhibition a sampler of German contemporary art from the closing years of the 20th century to the first decade of the 21st.
Every artist in the show has a unique take on the times. Berliner Anselm Reyle’s untitled mixed media on canvas work is an unapologetically decorative take on color field painting (think Gene Davis in reflective acrylic foil). Three huge photo portraits of a dour-faced Rubell family (Mera, Don and son Jason) by Thomas Ruff are objective: What you see is exactly what you see.
Formalist works in the show include five architectonic paintings by David Schnell in which the conventions of geometric perspective exert a force more powerful than gravity. There is a nod to art history in Albert Oehler’s 2008 painting “Ice”; an exercise in pop art overlaid with abstract expressionism. Homage is paid to German Expressionism of 1920s Berlin in two paintings by Christoph Ruckhäberle: “Big Fan” of 2006 and the compelling “Woman with Pearl Necklace” of 2004.
And then there are four socio-political works, represented in imposing scale by Neo Rauch. He, like Schnell and Ruckhäberle, are considered members of the Leipzig School, a contemporary art movement that, beginning is the late 1970s, centered on artists taught or studied at Leipzig’s Academy of Arts.
Neo Rauch, a Leipziger by birth, art training and, after reunification in 1990, by choice, is a painter of messages. Rauch grew up under communism in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). According to Roberts, Rauch once remarked that when he was a young man, there was nothing he wanted more than to escape to the West. Almost 30 years old when the Berlin wall came down, Rauch subsequently decided to stay in Leipzig. That city has since become a center of economic prosperity and culture in Germany.
The largest painting by Rauch on display is “Vorführung (Presentation)” of 2006. The nearly 10-foot-tall, 14-foot-wide painting is notable for its steep top-left-to-lower-right diagonal composition. In it, an oppressively pink sky appears behind a precarious arrangement of human figures, a banquet table and a house which appears on the verge of tumbling right off the bottom edge of the picture.
In this artist’s work, says Roberts, “the stage is set, you have a cast of characters and a dream-like set up.”
The mystery, and some of the politics, continues in the Titelman Gallery, where almost all the artists were either professors or students at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Dominating the gallery’s rear wall, the work that will drop you in your tracks is an untitled painting by Anselm Kiefer. Created in 2006, this bleak landscape is composed of charcoal, branches, plaster and metal chairs (the latter affixed to what amounts to the scene’s foreground). Unlike the people-filled paintings of Rauch, Kiefer aims to get your attention through the absence of figures. His foreboding landscape might remind you of a vineyard in winter, or a forest of felled trees. More ominously, it also brings to mind a no-man’s land, where row upon row of hastily erected posts hold unseen strands of barbed wire. The six empty chairs that jut from the bottom of the canvas underscore the picture’s theme of apocalyptic absence.
Near this, four small abstract works – knitted textiles, really, made on an industrial machine – by Rosemarie Trockel are a counterpoint to the emotional outpourings of the likes of Kiefer and Rauch. Also on display from this artist is a small, brown-painted plaster sculpture, modeled in the shape of an upturned ape’s head. The pursed lips of the beast hold, as though balanced, a plaster egg. Titled “Grosse als Form (Size as Form),” the sculpture was created in 1984, the same year in which Trockel created a suite of drawings of empathetically rendered chimpanzee faces.
In contrasting the unaffected freedom of animal expression with the artificial, ordered world of human culture, Trockel has said, “Jedes Tier ist eine Künstlerin (Every animal is an artist).”
