Past Exhibitions: Fall 2006

Martin Kobe, Untitled, 2003
Courtesy the Rubell Family Collection

Life after Death:
New Leipzig Paintings
from the Rubell Family Collection

For its only mid-Atlantic showing, this nationally touring exhibition at the AU Museum focuses on a much discussed, often controversial development in contemporary art—grandly-scaled paintings that echo traditions of social realism, particularly as it was practiced in East Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the seven artists represented—Tilo Baumgärtel, Tim Eitel, Martin Kobe, Neo Rauch, Christoph Ruckhäberle, David Schnell and Matthias Weischer—eschewed video, photography and installation art and chose to study figurative painting at the conservative Leipzig Art Academy. They persisted, creating a “school” that blends dream-elements of surrealism and a modernist spatial sense and matter-of-fact narrative. The Rubell Family Collection in Miami, Fla., is one of the nation’s premiere showcases for contemporary art. A 143-page color-illustrated catalog with a main essay by Mark Coetzee and Laura Steward-Heon accompanies the exhibition.

Eberhard Havekost, Totale Idylle, 1996
Courtesy the Rubell Family Collection

Eberhart Havekost:
1996-2006 Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection

This unprecedented exhibition traces the past decade of work by one of Germany’s most watched painters, Eberhard Havekost (b. 1967), who is based in Dresden and rarely shows his pieces outside Europe or New York. Havekost paints images based on his altered and manipulated photographs and video clips. Although his subjects are mostly bland urban details such as office windows, automobile windshields and the sides of buses, as well as contemporary figure groups and portrait heads—the precision and simplification of his technique create a sense of mystery, otherworldliness and anxiety. A catalog by Mark Coetzee, director of the Rubell Family Collection, accompanies the exhibition.

Mario de Biasi, The People's Anger
Courtesy the Hungarian Museum of Photography

Hungarian Revolution, 1956

More than 100 photographs commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution. In this emblematic event of the Cold War, a demonstration led by students blossomed into a national uprising against communist tyrants and their Soviet rulers. A wide range of subjects—Budapest street skirmishes, refugees at the Austrian border, scenes of suppression by the communist loyalists—photographed by foreign news media as well as Hungarian professionals and amateurs are represented. Ferenc Berendi, Mario de Biasi, Tamas Fener, Laszlo Haris, Ata Kando, Erich Lessing, Laszlo Rozsa, Ede Tomori and Geza Varro are among the photographers. The exhibition is jointly organized by the Association of Hungarian Photographers and the Hungarian Museum of Photography under the patronage of the Hungarian Ministry of Education and Culture. A catalog by Peter Baki, exhibition curator and director of the Hungarian Museum of Photography in Budapest, accompanies the exhibition.

Mindy Weisel, Writing Home, 2006
Courtesy the artist

Mindy Weisel:
Words on a Journey

Mindy Weisel’s heritage as the only daughter of Holocaust survivors has long spurred her work as a painter, author and lecturer (currently at the Corcoran School of Art and Design). In this exhibition, the Washington-based artist premieres works in an entirely new technique, fused glass. Weisel, an AU alumna, began working in glass two years ago almost by accident, taking an informal class near where she makes prints. There she discovered the medium’s “ability … to hold the moment, the memory, the feeling” more effectively than painting. Weisel starts each piece by writing calligraphic marks and then manipulates, improvises, stains and sometimes breaks up several pieces of the molten material to fuse and layer into a single composition. “Words on a Journey” (borrowed from a poem) refers to Weisel’s journey through life as well as the implied meanings within each piece. In one work, her father’s concentration camp number and mother’s love of the color blue fuse into a luminous, emotionally charged commentary on memory and loss. Catalog with an interview by Jack Rasmussen, AU Museum Director and Curator accompanies the exhibition.

Athena Tacha, Wave, 2005
Courtesy the artist

Athena Tacha: Small Wonders

One of the initiators of site-specific architectural sculpture, Athena Tacha premieres a new group of small scale works reflecting her abiding fascination with nature and space. Made variously of sand and stones, epoxy, grey slate, lead, aluminum, vellum and a host of other natural and synthetic materials, the 15 sculptures on view, none more than two feet high, invoke canyons, caves, a glacier and, frozen in mid-air, a waterfall, wave and volcano. Photoworks are also in the exhibition, including 14 compositions, each a grid of photos tracking a single detail from nature through time—a stone strata, tide pool or snow crack, for instance—in areas where the artist, an incessant global traveler, has visited. Two films (five and six minutes) revisit nature-based works made by Tacha in 1969. The artist, who has lived and taught in the Washington area since 1998, has received more than 40 public commissions internationally since the 1970s, among them an entire city block forming a park in downtown Philadelphia and two environmental installations at the Morgan Boulevard (blue line) and Grosvenor-Strathmore (red line) Washington Metrorail stations. A 47–page color-illustrated catalog with an essay by Anne Ellgood and article excerpts by Brenda J. Brown accompanies the exhibition.