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Bonanza, an exhibition of paintings, photography and installations by fifteen, young German artists: Nairy Baghramian, Dirk Bell, Michael Beutler, Henning Bohl, Lutz Braun, Ulla von Brandenburg, Andreas Diefenbach, Julia Horstmann, Friedrich Kunath, Kalin Lindena, Alex Müller, Stefan Müller, Roman Schramm, Hanna Schwarz, Jan Timme will be on view at the Tilton Gallery from March 10 – April 22, 2006. The exhibition was curated by Karola Grässlin from the Kunstverein in Braunschweig, Germany. There will be an opening reception on March 10, 2006 from 8 to 10 PM.
In past years, young German artists have electrified the art scene. From the beginning of the Eighties, it has been impossible to think of the international scene without the Germans, and we have become accustomed to the presence of individual superstars like Sigmar Polke or Gerhard Richter. What is new nowadays is that entire groups and generations are achieving global appeal. Curator Karola Grässlin has assembled 15 young, versatile and individualistic positions, which offer insights into the varied approaches adopted by a generation of artists all born in the Seventies.
Grässlin boldly presents her selection under the title Bonanza, which is not just a reference to the American export hit from the early years of television that made the names of Hoss, Little Joe and Pa from the Ponderosa ranch familiar worldwide, it also highlights the relationship between art and the market.
The exhibition shows the complex relationships within a generation of German artists whose works are full of cross references, recollections and associations that relate to one another and to their personal circle of friends, but also to their place in society, to art history, to film and to music. It is quite clear that neither the decorative nor the ornamental hold any terrors for them, that beauty and poetry, even romanticism are not taboo, and that they all believe unreservedly in the power of their means of artistic expression. The works on show provide impressive evidence that the appropriation and re-interpretation of old subjects from the collective cultural memory do not represent the decline of the West into a spiral of quotations or a sell-out to consumerism, but rather constitute an extra-temporal trade secret. In the final estimate art can only be reflective and modern in relation to what it once was. The more concentrated the historical context that it takes as its point of departure, the more precise will be the form it assumes in the present. The difference between ‘alien’ and ‘native’ or ‘German’ and ‘non-German’ is secondary here: the individual’s own, predominantly trans-cultural frame of reference is of more importance. So a good number of the artists on show are mobile in many directions: the main focus of their life and work may be in Germany, but they can work equally well anywhere else.
Equating this community of artists with a lucrative goldmine is no less self-ironic than presenting them as a big, happy family in the spirit of the Cartwrights. And this brings us to something peculiarly German: for against the background of the idealized vision of the artist which was promulgated by German Romanticism and has survived up to the present day, praising their own work as a choice investment can only be seen as a reflection of the bourgeois paradox that recognises the laws of money as the only universal ones and yet at the same time holds those laws in contempt.
Susanne Prinz
