East German Art Landscapes ∙ East-German Artscapes
April 22, 2026 – September 9, 2026
Group Exhibition
DIE GALERIE
Our group exhibition invites visitors on a journey through the art scenes of eastern Germany—from Brandenburg through Berlin and Leipzig to Dresden. We accompany the artists on these journeys—to the urban centers of artistic creation as well as to outlying areas. Along the way, allegorical and real landscapes merge, offering a glimpse both backward and forward, inward and outward.
The exhibition brings together diverse artistic perspectives across a broad spectrum of painting, photography, and sculpture. Geography serves, to some extent, as a guide: We span a broad arc—both spatially and temporally—centered around our core artists Volker Stelzmann, Johannes Heisig, Klaus Zylla, and Beate Debus. This brings us to the draftsman Gerhard Altenbourg (1926–1989), a thoroughly poetic artist with a deep knowledge of literature—a brilliant draftsman of landscapes, portraits, as well as grotesque drawings and fantastical figurations.
Together with the renowned photographer Evelyn Richter (1930–2021), we explore the inner landscapes of the people of the former GDR, while the young Berlin photographer Lars Wiedemann (b. 1973) brings to light the regional transformation processes of our time.
In painting, a diverse range of tensions emerges: in Old Master techniques and Mannerist contortions in the work of Volker Stelzmann (*1940); enigmatic, inscrutable, and grotesque in the work of Clemens Gröszer (1951–2014); and allegorical, with a keen sense of psychology, in the work of Doris Ziegler (*1949). Hubertus Giebe (*1953) uses his expressive visual language to unfold striking parables about the world and world history, similar to Johannes Heisig (*1953) and yet quite different from him. Klaus Zylla (*1953), on the other hand, seems completely liberated from the conventions of “German” painting, while Ellen Fuhr’s (1958–2017) painterly forays through Berlin resemble the painted pages of her diary. The Dresden-based painter Frank Hoffmann (*1972) deconstructs art history into blurriness, into abstract mists.
Finally, Beate Debus (*1957), as a sculptor, speaks her own language; her work knows no realities other than its own, born of a physical process that transforms the weight of wood or bronze into movement and dance.