Der Menschen Klee

An exhibition about paintings from London and Düsseldorf with Anna Barriball, Eva Berendes, Brian Chalkley, Declan Clarke, Richard Clegg, Sophie von Hellermann, Paul McDevitt, Tim Stoner, Neal Tait, Markus Vater, Martin Westwood, curated by Gertrud Peters and Cornelius Quabeck.

While his own exhibition “Pop Art in England” travelled successfully through Europe and the USA, the painter Ron Kitaj focused on figurative painting, which was unpopular at the time, in 1976 at the Hayward Gallery in London with the show he curated “The Human Clay”. 48 painters took part; Most of them knew each other, followed each other's work with interest and exhibited in the same gallery in London's West End.

In the catalog for “The Human Clay”, Kitaj coined the genre term “School of London”, which aimed at the diversity and liveliness of contemporary art in England. The work of these artists, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff, had a strong influence on a younger generation of painters in London.

With “The Human Klee,” KIT is showing a painting exhibition whose artists were also selected by a colleague: Cornelius Quabeck. He studied with Jörg Immendorff and Albert Oehlen at the Düsseldorf Academy before moving to London's Chelsea College to complete his MA Fine Arts. He either studied with, was taught by, or worked with the participating artists. This exhibition is like a conversation between artists in pictures regarding two different ideas about art and teaching. “The Human Klee” is an onomatopoeic rather than a literal translation of the title “The Human Clay” chosen by Kitaj at the time (which in turn is borrowed from a letter from WH Audens to Lord Byron)*, and is at the same time an indication of how incomplete a comparison of two Education systems must be in which the professor's class dominates here, and the students' dialogue with changing teachers there dominates.

Nevertheless, it can be said that with the boom in the British art scene in the early 1990s, a rethink also took place in Germany when it came to the media status of art and artists' careers. “Young British Art” not only highlighted Britishness, but also the youth of the exhibiting artists. In addition to the seemingly limitless enthusiasm for the stars of the scene, the artists developed an interest in the intensive discussion through work and conversations in the studio. A new seriousness that can also be found in the artistic attitude of professors such as Dieter Krieg, Albert Oehlen, Hubert Kiecol or Michael Krebber and several other teachers or former teachers in Germany. The works of the artists in this exhibition make the acuteness of this dialogue visible.

• Organisation