External News and Events
Exhibition - 'The Age of Expression: Twentieth-century Northern European Prints from the Barber Institute'
Temporary exhibition at the Strang Print Room
UCL Art Collections,Gower Street, London,WC1E 6BT
8 February – 25 March 2011
Open Monday – Friday, 1 – 5pm, Admission is FREE.
From February 8th to March 25th, 2011, UCL Art Collections at the Strang Print Room will host an exhibition which brings together a group of exceptional examples of Northern European printmaking to local audiences.
The Age of Expression: Twentieth-century Northern European Prints from the Barber Institute will showcase works by renowned 20th-century artists including Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Egon Schiele, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and other artists associated with German Expressionism. As responses to WWI and its aftermath, the works in this exhibition all use traditional printmaking techniques in innovative ways, to evoke powerful emotional reactions. The Expressionist aesthetic, featuring simple imagery and the bold use of contrast, lent itself well to the radical politics of the day and resonated with revolutionary movements around the world, reaching as far as Mexico.
Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rotluff reinvigorate the woodcut technique – perfected by German Renaissance printmakers such as Albrecht Dürer – by returning to the simplest oppositions of black and white. Max Beckmann and Lovis Corinth both address the futility and suffering of war through religious imagery in Resurrection (1918/19) and Christ on the Cross (1919), while George Grosz satirises post-WWI German society. The exhibition also includes one of Egon Schiele’s rare prints, where the artist used the drypoint technique to create the bristling outline of a crouching woman.
This exhibition is part of a successful exhibition exchange programme between the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham and UCL Art Collections, University College London, designed to promote wider public access to university art collections. It follows on from Highlights on Paper from UCL Art Collections which was on display at the Barber Institute in 2009.
Contact: Nina Pearlman (UCL Art Collections)
Contact and further information details: college.art@ucl.ac.uk , +44 (0)20 7679 2540