Online exhibition

 
Parallel to our ongoing presentation at the Galerie am Kleinen Schlossplatz in Stuttgart, we are showing works by Adolf Hölzel at this location.

Hölzel was an artist, theorist and educator in one person, which still puzzles us today: Depending on how he was seen preferentially, one discovered a different person - and a different approach to his work, the whole of which cannot be defined only by the facets of this multiple personality. As a contemporary of Vincent van Gogh and Ferdinand Hodler, he is one of the long unrecognized pioneers of modernism. His primacy of the "means" by which an artist should arrive at his work not only placed the view of art on daring, wholly unacademic legs, but also opened art to abstraction.
Influenced by Viennese Art Nouveau and French Im- and Post-Impressionism, he perceived parallel currents such as those of the Nabis or Japonism and allowed them to flow casually into his work. Hölzel's teaching, however, followed its own paths, which were guided less by laws than by "orders of feeling". For "not the law, but the manner of its application" constituted his pedagogical as well as creative genius - which even left enough room for the rule-breaking play with creative means.

The exhibition presents an overview of the almost inexhaustible work of the Moravian-born artist, from his Dachau school to his time in Stuttgart, where from 1905 to 1919, as a professor and then as a teacher for a more private circle, he set the course of modernism, which could be linked to other European movements and continues to have an impact to the present day.