The card is easy to use and yet experimental. It has an intimate and unpretentious aura, it is subtle and tactile. Even in the age of digitization, paper is a medium on which the world is represented. With around 300 highlights and new discoveries from the Deutsche Bank Collection, The World on Paper it shows the fascination that the medium of paper has held on artists since post-war Modernism and how this sensual and pragmatic material has continually opened up new creative possibilities.
The first work in the show was done by Maria Lassnig in 1948, while the most recent one was created by Zilla Leutenegger in 2018. For art after 1945, the Deutsche Bank Collection is one of the most important collections of works on paper in the world. world. The first exhibition at the Palais Populaire documents the diversity of this extraordinary art collection, featured in bank buildings and exhibitions around the world. The show marks the beginning of a series of exhibitions in the new Berlin venue which will shed light on ever new aspects of the collection in the years to come.
The World on Paper takes up the architecture of the Palais Populaire and presents three thematic "worlds" on three floors that deal with central aspects of contemporary art. The first part is dedicated to abstract art. A leitmotiv is the empty white sheet of paper, a mental space in which the first rudimentary forms are shown, which then condense into gestural and geometric compositions and finally into numbers, symbols, words and ordering systems. The next two sections of the exhibition focus on people's self-image, their vision of the body and identity, as well as personal and collective history.
The last section investigates the artists' examination of constantly changing urban spaces and deals with technologies and the new economic and symbolic functions of images. The exhibition also draws on other media and practices: installation, performance, sculpture, film, theatre, literature and graphic novels.
The World on Paper documents how the focus on works on paper has given rise to a young and future-oriented collection. The latter is not only oriented to the epicenters and well-known protagonists of the art world, but also to peripheral areas: places where young artists and emplacements that have attracted little attention can be discovered, where new and often surprising worlds open up to the spectator.
Image: Andrea Zittel * 1965,
AZ Homestead Units #2, 2001
© Andrea Zittel
Three World on Paper
Berlin – 27 September 2018 – 07 January 2019
