Mude Helden - Ferdinand Hodler, Aleksandr Dejneka, Neo Rauch - Tapa dura

The early years of the twentieth century were marked by the life-reform movement, which fed on the one hand from the ideas of Romanticism, and on the other reactivated secularized Christian motifs in the nativity of the 'New Man'. The Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) was one of the leading artistic exponents of this movement. In an artificially created harmony with nature, his monumental figures set the surface of the picture in rhythmic motion with silhouette-like expressive gestures.

One of Hodler's hitherto most important successors was the Russian painter Aleksandr Deyneka (1899-1969). In his motifs, but also in the body language and modelling of his characters, he took his bearings from the eurhythmic movements of the Swiss artist's figures, but placed them in prospering industrial landscapes.

Finally, the painter Neo Rauch (b. 1960), who grew up and received his artistic training in communist East Germany, takes up once more the type of the 'New Man' on which Hodler and Deyneka had put their stamp. However, his figures exaggerate the aspect of inhibited action, recognizable already in his predecessors, and this aspect emerges, in the end, in aimless messing around in absurd configurations. Here the utopia of the 'New Man' is turned on its head to become a rejection of the belief in progress and of all ideology.

German description: Die drei Kuenstler der Ausstellung, Ferdinand Hodler, Aleksandr Dejneka und Neo Rauch, stehen im 20. Jahrhundert fuer die Geschichte der Utopie des -Neuen Menschen- von seinem Entwurf bis zu seinem Scheitern bzw. Nachleben. Sie verkorpern mit ihrem kuenstlerischen Werk exemplarisch die drei Etappen, in denen sich dieser Prozess vollzieht."