Online exhibition

 
World art of the avant-garde
In its new exhibition, Galerie Schlichtenmaier presents international art that, from the 1960s onwards, placed aesthetics on a new post-modern footing. As a pivotal point as well as a crossover phenomenon of the most innovative visual languages since the dawn of modernism, Galerie Schlichtenmaier presents the work of Thomas Lenk, who reduced his oeuvre to a few forms in all the diversity of his work, in a hitherto unknown context - that of his own art collection.
Thomas Lenk is one of the avant-garde artists who, completely at the height of his time, reconciled Minimalism and Pop Art by creating valid geometries of being from banal everyday forms, culminating in his stratifications. "Artworks will have to change," the 1970 Biennale participant found. "The artists who make them will have to think differently: more politically, more socially, more responsibly." If he indeed developed, for example, his spatially staged pictorial cosmos from round and rounded square beer mats, on both a small and large scale, this was no mere gimmick, even if it was a characteristic expression of a variety of international art.
Thomas Lenk was friends and acquaintances with pioneering trailblazers of art at the end of the 20th century: he kept in touch with ZERO colleagues on the Rhine, found access to many European masters of his time through his connections to the legendary Galerie Müller in Stuttgart, and he and his friends Pfahler, Mack, and Uecker were critically acclaimed in Venice as the star of "one of the best pavilions" of the above-mentioned Biennale.
The list of his friends and acquaintances is too long to be duly introduced in a press note. Reference should be made only to one of Roman Opalka's earliest paintings from the series "OPALKA 1965 / 1 - ∞" - an exceptional painting in red among the approximately 230 gray and white works known and scattered around the world - as well as to a circle segment painting by the leading US minimalist Robert Mangold, "1/6 Gray-Green Area Circle" from 1966.
The exhibition of the Schlichtenmaier Gallery shows once again that southern Germany was not only a center of modernism, but also an anchor point of the international avant-garde.

Artists of the exhibition:
Karl-Heinz Adler; Horst Antes; Imre Bak; Erdmut Bramke; Peter Brüning; Siegfried Cremer; Karl Fred Dahmen; Lucio Fontana; Christoph Freimann; Winfred Gaul; Herrmann Glöckner; Karl Otto Götz; Edgar Gutbub; Erich Hauser; Gerhard Hoehme; Oskar Holweck; Ellsworth Kelly; Thomas Lenk; Roy Lichtenstein; Heinz Mack; Robert Mangold; François Morellet; Istvan Nádler; Roman Opalka; Georg Karl Pfahler; Lothar Quinte; Arnulf Rainer; Paul Reich; Daniel Spoerri; Robert Stanley; William Turnbull; Victor Vasarely; Lambert Maria Wintersberger