140 | MAY/JUN 2017 | ISSUE 103
For three years, Haus der Kunst director Okwui
Enwezor, together with Katy Siegel and Ulrich
Wilmes, conducted research on art produced
in the two decades following the Second World
War. Their collective endeavor culminated
in “Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the
Atlantic, 1945–1965,” an exhibition of more than
350 artworks by 218 artists from 65 countries.
Challenging the presumption that the genealogies
of Modernist languages are rooted solely in a
Euro-American narrative, the show resulted in
a radical dislocation of one’s perspective on art
history in the aftermath of global conflict.
In the grand atrium of Haus der Kunst,
visitors found an ensemble of sculptural works,
including David Medalla’s Cloud Gates – Bubble
Machine (1965/2013) and Atsuko Tanaka’s iconic
Electric Dress (1956). These transformative works
established a formal dialogue with a gigantic,
geometric, black painted wood sculpture by Polish
artist Mathias Goeritz, who settled in Mexico in
- Titled The Serpent (1953), the work slits a
mesmerizing sculptural line that dramatically cuts
through space, representing the divisions caused
by the trauma of war.
Such a dramatic introduction established the
tenor of the show, and primed the audience for its
eight chapters. The first was titled “Aftermath: Zero
Hour and the Atomic Era,” and gathered works
made in reaction to the deployment of atomic
bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the
apocalyptic dehumanization and engineered
extermination of Jews in Europe. Gerhard Richter’s
paintings, which were modeled after archival
photographs of emaciated Jewish men, women
and children in concentration camps, were
displayed beside the first photographs of Japanese
survivors suffering from radiation sickness,
taken by Japanese military photographer Yōsuke
Yamahata. This juxtaposition made clear the
parallel disappearances of the human body, and the
effects of these events on artists in many corners of
the world.
The most compelling works in this chapter were
found in Iri and Toshi Maruki’s “Hiroshima Panels”
(1950–82). Eight of the original 15 were on display,
transported to Munich from their permanent home
in Saitama, Japan. The panels’ imagery intertwines
traditional East Asian composition, abstract forms
and experimental figuration to evoke Dante-esque
scenes that translate the blast’s carnage and the
horrors of fascism. Nearby, formless sculptures
appeared as dismembered bodies in Joseph Beuys’s
theatrical Monuments to the Stag (1958/1982),
transmitting visual echoes of the violence, torture
and submission in concentration camps.
The rest of the exhibition presented radical
mutations through abstract and figurative
languages in art from 1945 to 1965, ignited
by postwar conditions across the globe. This
included a mapping of Informalist and Abstract
Expressionist painting in the second chapter,
titled “Form Matters,” which included figures from
Japan, Korea and the subcontinent. In this chapter,
one also found the results of deconstructive art
practices in Europe by immigrant artists such
as Marta Minujín, a pioneer of “happenings,” to
explore the impulse of freedom among a postwar
generation disillusioned with modernity.
In later chapters, geometric abstraction was
presented in the contexts of the aesthetic programs
in new utopias. Such efforts were widely manifested
in Latin America, catalyzed in some scenes by
immigrant European artists who were fleeing the
war. Within this genealogy of art history, where
the Madí group from Argentina and both Concrete
and Neo-Concrete art from Brazil connect to
Constructivism and Neo-Plasticism, we find a wider
context and new terminologies for the postwar
periodization of early works by Pakistani-British
artist Rasheed Araeen. Even more radical was the
exhibition’s fourth chapter, “Realisms,” where
Soviet socialist realism met the iconographies
of Mexican muralism and China’s Cultural
Revolution, but with a curatorial drive to dismantle
the idyllic, fictional heroism of these artistic genres.
This occurred, for instance, by placing a poetic,
propagandistic painting by Li Xiushi near a canvas
that depicts a queue of women, each waiting for
a turn to visit her husband in prison, which is the
work of Inji Efflatoun, a political prisoner herself in
Egypt in the 1950s.
“Postwar” left viewers pondering the
conclusion that experimentation in art, even that
which we conceive as formalist, is always affected
and transformed by chronic political turmoil.
INTI GUERREROMUNICH
Haus der KunstPOSTWAR: ART BETWEEN THE PACIFIC
AND THE ATLANTIC, 1945–1965
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