Carl Grossberg (1894–1940) is one of the outstanding painters of the New Objectivity movement. His extensive oeuvre, created in just 15 years, is devoted almost exclusively to the themes of architecture and industry. With its formal clarity and rigour, it expresses a new, quasi-photographic way of seeing. In iconic images, Grossberg reflects the rapid technical and industrial progress of the first third of the 20th century - without celebrating it euphorically. On the contrary, his often extremely reduced compositions encourage us to critically question progress and its effects on human beings. In particular, his ambiguous 'dream pictures', unparalleled in the art of the 1920s and 1930s, reveal Grossberg to be a highly sensitive intellectual. His art conjures up the magic of things in order to reveal other realities behind them.
No exhibition or publication on New Objectivity art is complete without Carl Grossberg. Yet there has been no museum retrospective of his work since 1994. The Von der Heydt Museum intends to fill this gap. The aim is not only to finally make Grossberg's unmistakable artistic position clearly visible again. It also aims to highlight his relevance to the present day, for in retrospect his work proves to be highly topical, both artistically and socially.
Carl Grossberg's choice of motif and the quasi-photographic sobriety of his painting have inspired pioneering photographers of subsequent generations, not least Bernd and Hilla Becher and their many students. Today, however, his works encounter a fundamentally different approach to media images, which are produced in rapid succession, fed incessantly into digital networks, and subjected to multiple mutations and manipulations until they can almost become 'dream images'. And while Grossberg's works document the industrial awakening at the beginning of the twentieth century from today's perspective, a structural change with as yet unforeseeable social consequences is currently taking place - and by no means only in Germany - for which convincing visual forms are currently being negotiated.
The Von der Heydt Museum is presenting the exhibition 'Carl Grossberg: The Magic of Things' in cooperation with the Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg. Both museums are closely linked to the artist's biography: he was born in Elberfeld, now part of the city of Wuppertal, founded in 1929, and lived in Sommerhausen, south of Würzburg, from 1921. Accordingly, he is well represented in the collections of both museums.
