Open to the public from the 12 October 2019 to the 19 January 2020 at the Gallerie d'Italia - Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, museum headquarters of Intesa Sanpaolo in Naples, the exhibition Berlin 1989. Painting in Germany before and after the Wall, edited by Luca Beatrice. After The thousand lights of New York and in 2017 London Shadow in 2018, Berlin 1989 thus closes the triptych of exhibitions dedicated to large cities which, at the end of the 900s, changed the history of art.
In an engaging journey of 21 works created between 1972 and 2003, on loan from Italian galleries and private collections, Berlin 1989 presents masterpieces by the most important post-war German painters including Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Albert Oehlen. The exhibition allows an immersion in the energetic Berlin of the late twentieth century, where a painting comes to life that interprets the spirit of the time and uses a free, impetuous language with dissonant tones, pushing creativity and the desire for renewal to the extreme.
Heralded as one of the most anticipated anniversaries of 2019, on November 9, thirty years will have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That symbol of division of Europe was built in 1961. It remained standing for twenty-eight years, or for a shorter period of time than what has passed since its demolition. The question then arises: since then, has history really turned the page? Berlin before and after the Wall was a creative, vital, energetic city, dominated by a profound drive for change yet maintaining the charm of old Europe still tied to the climate of the Cold War. David Bowie wrote three albums there and one of his most famous songs, Heroes. Pink Floyd dedicated to the Wall, The Wall, an extraordinary concept album that turned into a film. Writers like Pier Vittorio Tondelli loved to jump on the free Autobahn, the destination of their youthful raids.
Because everything was going on in Berlin. A new generation of filmmakers was imposing itself in the cinema with a marked authorial slant, Wenders and Fassbinder are the most famous, while Christiane F., although defined as a commercial product, managed to tell the youth unease between West and East. In 1982, Zeitgeist, a historic exhibition curated by Christos Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal, was inaugurated at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. At the center is the emergence of neo-expressionism as the "spirit of the age", looking for antecedents in the art of the 60s and 70s. Highlights are the work of Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, AR Penck, Sigmar Polke.
In parallel with the success of the Italian Transavantgarde and the new American figuration, German painting established itself all over the world, assuming the denomination of Neo-expressionism, and its exponents Neue Wilden, the new savages, to underline a certain brutality of a painting played on gestures emphatic and strong narrative system. The protagonist was a real artistic movement that went up to the new decade and beyond. Just two years after the fall of the Wall and less than ten since Zeitgeist, the Martin-Gropius-Bau presented a new overview of new art in no longer divided Berlin: another epochal exhibition who took the title Metropolis, from Fritz Lang's cinematic masterpiece.
Going backwards, already in 1980 the group of Berlin painters Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salomé, Bernd Zimmer emerged who in 1977 had opened the Galerie am Moritzplatz in Kreuzberg, a self-managed space: their rebellious painting, which is inspired by the daily news of the media, rock music, punk culture, as well as themes of a political, artistic or sexual nature, thus mixing high and low in full postmodern climate. In the background there is always a threatening and fascinating Berlin, claustrophobic and transgressive, gloomy and extraordinarily vital.
Young and cult painting, which in short, from spaces off it will conquer the market, galleries and museums. At the explosion of the phenomenon, early 80s, some are already very famous: Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer (the latter exhibited several times in Naples at the Lia Rumma Gallery) are gaining an important place in the history of art , active since the end of the 60s, a real link between conceptual art and the new painting. It is then the turn of the younger generation, represented for example by Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Bernd Zimmer, Karl Horst Hödicke, Markus Lüpertz, AR Penck, Martin Disler, Siegfried Anzinger, Hermann Albert. While breathing a common climate, each painter's own cultural and stylistic difference is evident.
