Head over Heels. Doris Ziegler - Painting

03.07. - 07.08.2021

On the occasion of the exhibition, the monograph "DORIS ZIEGLER. The Passage Work - Painting" will be presented. Edited by Dr. Paul Kaiser, with essays and texts about the paintings as well as the catalog raisonné of the paintings (1970-2020), Weimar 2020, ISBN 978-3-00-066335-2, 39,90 €. In Doris Ziegler's painting "Kopfüber - Head over Heels" (1992), time seems to be out of joint and the personnel searching for a foothold-we see aggregate states of being human in a situation of radical upheaval. The painting by the most important female artist of the Leipzig School is inspired by the social turbulence after the end of the GDR, which resulted in a transformation of the existing, and yet does not dissolve into a mere reference to a caesura in contemporary history. Instead, the figures irritate our mundane sense of security. They symbolize the incursion of the unforeseen into the static of life plans - as we have all had to experience recently, and some for the first time, in existential form. The world, Doris Ziegler shows, exists through change and transition. The painting offered here for the first time by Döbele Kunst Mannheim belongs to her masterful "Passage" cycle - as does the painting "Aufbruch Straße - Departure Street" Between 1988 and 1994 Ziegler's clear-sighted and at the same time unsparing cycle bundled the experience of a transformation without historical parallel with an open outcome. In it, facets, snapshots, and phase jumps condense into a unique artistic panorama. Doris Ziegler belongs (like her male colleagues Arno Rink, Volker Stelzmann and Wolfgang Peuker) to the so-called Second Generation of the world-famous Leipzig School. At the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig she received decisive impulses from her teacher Werner Tübke and later also from Wolfgang Mattheuer. Shortly before the reunification, she herself was appointed assistant and finally, in 1993, professor for the core curriculum of painting. Until now, her significance for the project of a Leipzig school of painting was widely underestimated. It was not until the international response to the 2019 exhibition "Point of No Return" at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, which devoted a room to the "Passage" paintings of the Leipzig-based artist, that a belated tribute to her radical life's work began. The Mannheim exhibition now presents a panorama of her work with paintings from 1978 to 2020, ranging from the yearning "Das Traumatelier - The dream atelier" (1978) to the programmatic self-portrait "Selbst mit Hut und Palette - Self with dog and palette" (1983) and the painting "New York, New York" (1992), inspired by a stay in the United States, to more recent works imbued with travel experiences "Madonna del Ponte I" (2015). It was the "cool look", that interested Doris Ziegler in painting for a long time, trained on the New Objectivity art of the interwar period, and that distinguished her from her generation colleagues. However, the artist also achieved her formal stability in the development of her pictorial inventions, which broke away from the conventional canon of expectations, through her work on still lifes "Stillleben mit Schachbrett - Still Life with Chessboard" (2016), which was intensified in several creative phases. High respect for the portrait has never held Doris Ziegler back from the experiment of seeking her place precisely in the traditional figure painting. The artist found her magical place early on in the Leipzig district of Plagwitz, whose architecture "Stelzenhaus III" (2014) and living environment fascinated her in equal measure.

read more