Online exhibition

The intentions of the exhibition could hardly be more different - but it is part of the fascination of the show that four artists are presented here, who have all taken this step from gestural painting or sculpture to a partly strict, partly playful signal art and color space design. The artists in question are Peter Brüning, Winfred Gaul, Otto Herbert Hajek, and Georg Karl Pfahler, all of whom were lured to Stuttgart to study by Willi Baumeister's good reputation. In the 1950s the three painters and Hajek as a sculptor found an informal pictorial language, which they left behind more or less abruptly around 1960 in order to react to the social and aesthetic changes of the time. These were marked by influences from the United States, where Pop Art was spreading, as well as by perceptions of metropolitan everyday culture, which manifested themselves, for example, in traffic signs or cartographic sign systems.

With these important exponents of a paradigm shift, the exhibition shows one of the most exciting phases in German postwar art - especially in Düsseldorf and Stuttgart - whose impact can hardly be overestimated.