Carl Grossberg

The exhibition at the Von der Heydt Museum celebrates the rediscovery of one of the outstanding painters of New Objectivity: Carl Grossberg (1894-1940). His extensive oeuvre, which was created in a period of just under 20 years, is almost exclusively dedicated to the themes of architecture and industry. With its formal clarity and rigour, it is an expression of a new, photographic way of seeing and reflects the technical progress of the first third of the 20th century. The reduced compositions encourage us to critically scrutinise industrial progress and its effects on people.

The exhibition, the first retrospective in over 30 years, takes a comprehensive new look at Carl Grossberg's oeuvre and presents a series of previously unknown works. It shows how topical Grossberg's works are, both artistically and socially. In particular, the ambiguously legible ‘dream pictures’, unique in the art of the 1920s and 1930s, show him to be a highly sensitive intellectual. Grossberg's art conjures up the magic of things, visualising the complexity of the modern world and its internal contradictions. Parallels to today arise from the structural change currently taking place with as yet unforeseeable social consequences, for which convincing visual forms are currently being negotiated.

Carl Grossberg's choice of motifs and the sobriety of his painting are inextricably linked to the photography that emerged at the same time. And for their part, they have inspired pioneering photographers of subsequent generations. Exemplary selected positions from August Sander to Bernd and Hilla Becher to Thomas Ruff make this clear. Today, however, Grossberg's images encounter a fundamentally different approach to media images, which are produced in rapid succession, constantly fed into digital networks and subjected to multiple manipulations until they can almost become ‘dream images’.

The Von der Heydt-Museum is realising the exhibition "Carl Grossberg. Objective - Magical - Visionary" in cooperation with the Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg (MiK). Both museums are closely linked to the artist's biography: He was born in Elberfeld, which is now part of Wuppertal, and lived in Sommerhausen, south of Würzburg, from 1921. Accordingly, he is well represented in the collections of both museums.