Online exhibition

 
You don't have to have been to Giverny to get an idea of the place not far from Paris - it will be associated with Claude Monet's water lily paintings, created in his retreat during the last decades of the painter's life. His legendary garden was lost, but was rebuilt - in the style of his art. What we experience today, whether there in person or in thought, is a garden that "consists more of tones and colors than of flowers." What Marcel Proust means here is the myth of Giverny, which opens up to us differently today.

The exhibition at Galerie Schlichtenmaier shows works by contemporary artists who have dealt directly or indirectly with Monet's work and his garden. Beginning with informal and lyrical-expressive turns - by Karl Otto Götz, Winfred Gaul or Emil Kiess -, the Giverny show leads over the generation born around 1950 - with Ralph Fleck, Luzia Simons, Werner Fohrer and Bernd Zimmer - who, each in their own understanding of realism, dealt with the themes of the garden, of water lilies or water, to younger artists - including Peter Sehringer, Lorenz Spring, Cornelius Völker, Elger Esser, and Anna Bittersohl, who approach the flower and garden motif with a partly critical, partly innovative awareness.

The exhibition not only demonstrates the lasting impact of the late Claude Monet in particular on modernism and our present day, but also shows that it is still possible to take an independent position on the mythical Gesamtkunstgebilde Giverny with painterly and photographic means. That it also lives on as an idea without having to retrace the turn back to Monet is the merit of the artists who are active in the national and international art landscape.