WERNER TÜBKE - DRAWINGS AND WATERCOLOURS

The exhibition ‘Werner Tübke – Drawings and Watercolours’ is part of a dual exhibit. While the exhibition in Fundatie Zwolle entitled ‘Werner Tübke – Master Painter between East and West’ focuses on his paintings, Kasteel het Nijenhuis in Heino/Wijhe presents his works on paper. Werner Tübke (1929-2004) is seen as the most important painter of the GDR. With Wolfgang Mattheuer and Bernhard Heisig he formed the Leipziger Schule from the mid-1960s onward, which would largely determine the face of art in East Germany. Tübke’s undisputed masterpiece is the is panorama located in Bad Frankenhausen featuring the German Peasants’ War of 1524-1526, which is sometimes referred to as the Sistine Chapel of the North.

Tübke’s master craftsmanship was unparalleled in East Germany and gave him a relatively large extent of artistic freedom. By translating the political message of his commissions into a more general human story and giving universal significance to current affairs, he secured his autonomy as an artist. As an exponent of the renais-sance tradition, Tübke believed that all art began with ‘disegno’, which refers to both drawing and design. Spanning Tübke’s entire career, the exhibition in Kasteel het Nijenhuis gives a good overview of his development. The exhibition starts with a selection of works from the 1950s and 60s and then moves on to a presentation along the lines of classical genres: self-portraits, landscapes, nudes and portraits. The final group of works dates back to the period after the Reunification. These works are characterised by grotesque scenes against a romantic background.

Werner Tübke, Student with green coat (study for ‘Working class and intelligentsia’), 1970, watercolour on paper, 70x 48 cm.

In addition to line drawings in black lead and charcoal, the exhibition presents colourful watercolours, with the attractive mountainscapes in Germany and Greece belonging to the best among Tübke’s body of work. Another highlight at the exhibition are the preliminary studies in watercolour that Tübke made in 1970 for Working Class and Intelligentsia, a monumental mural in the Karl Marx University in Leipzig, the model of which is currently on display in Zwolle. Where his paintings represent the master in optima forma, his drawings and watercolours show Tübke’s continuous search and experimentation. Without these experiments on paper, the painter Werner Tübke would not have existed.

The exhibition ’Werner Tübke – Drawings and Watercolours’ is organised in close cooperation with Galerie Schwind and the Tübke Stiftung Leipzig.

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