a chemist's art collection

On the second-last full day of my recent trip to Germany I accidentally discovered a catalogue of the Ziegler collection, a corpus of more than 100 20th century paintings collected by Nobel laureate Karl Ziegler (as in Ziegler Natta catalyst), his wife and their children. Ziegler held the patent for a process that is used globally to make plastics like polyethylene, so with the royalties from that, the Zieglers were able to decorate their home with original art.

I must have seen his name on labels back in the 1980s, when visiting exhibitions of painters like Karl Schmidt-Rotluff or Christian Rohlfs eg at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, and more recently at the big Marc/Macke exhibition at Bonn in 2014. But I completely missed the memo when the collection got its permanent home at the Kunstmuseum Mülheim, now housed in the former central post office of that city, where it can be seen in various reshuffles. The museum was closed for renovations for a few years until May 2024, but I also missed the memo when it reopened. So after finding out about it rather belatedly, I obviously had to visit on the following day.

Currently they are showing part 1 of a 2-part (or more?) exhibition showcasing the Ziegler collection, with Nolde, Klee and Feininger being the stars this time. The special exhibition is housed in a suite of six rooms, with three dedicated to Nolde, one each to Klee, Feininger and the Zieglers.

This exhibition runs until January 11, 2026. From February, part 2 will be focused on the works of Marc and Macke. One of my favourite works in the first exhibition is Lyonel Feininger's Roter Turm II:

Wikipedia

I also loved Klee's Seiltänzer, 1923 and Deutsche Stadt BR., 1928, along with most other things on show. I was a bit grumpy that they didn't show all of the 115 works at once, that would be quite spectacular (it's worth buying the catalogue to see them all at once!). I'm looking forward to seeing all of the 15 Macke paintings in the second exhibition, they make a very impressive set (wheras Franz Marc is less well represented in the collection and their fellow Blue Rider Kandinsky is surprisingly absent). The thing to remember about the collection is that the Zieglers very much chose pretty pictures to decorate their home. Luckily they had good taste (from my point of view) but when browsing the entire catalogue, the dominance of the decorative and the absence of challenging abstract art like, for instance, Kandinsky's are quite obvious. Also, the collection is very German, so no Chagall, van Gogh, Miro, Braque, Picasso, although some of these artists are represented elsewhere in the museum's collection. (I seem to remember from the history bits written on the staircase walls that the museum lost 90% of its collection to a fire during WW II, which would explain why their holdings outside the Ziegler collection are quite limited.)

PS there is a recent Chiuz article on chemists as art collectors which includes a short biography of Ziegler, but no more than you would find in his German Wikipedia entry as well. The other example that also occurred to me is also covered, namely Alfred Bader, of Aldrich chemicals, whose art works were featured on the covers of Aldrich catalogues back in the days (before they were swallowed by Sigma).

art to take part in

Some thoughts on
Yoko Ono: Music of the mind
Kunstsammlung NRW: K20
Düsseldorf
(until 16.3.2025)
(in collaboration with the Tate Modern)

I came to this exhibition a bit by accident and without knowing much about Yoko Ono beyond the bits that everybody knows, so it was an interesting learning experience. I found out that much of her work is based on the concept of making the audience create the art, eg by just displaying an object and an instruction what to do with it. Such as lots of white walls to draw or write on. or a blanket to create interesting shapes with. Some of the creations were naturally ephemeral, like the game of chess with two sets of white pieces, to be played until you lose track of which ones are yours (professional chess players probably wouldn't have much of a problem?), whereas the ones drawn on the walls presumably last (and evolve) as long as the exhibition.

The artist compared her work to that of a composer who only creates the score as an instruction, from which musicians then produce the work of art - with potentially different outcomes depending on how much effort and skill goes into the execution, the acoustic of the venue, the support of the audience, etc. I'm guessing that this is also the thought that inspired the title of the exhibition: the artist creates the art in the mind of the participating audience, much like the composer creates it in the mind of performing musicians.

In the last 10 years I have come to realise that (to me at least) trying to play music is much more enlightening and enjoyable than only listening to it, so this participatory approach to art made a lot of sense to me on that level. Even though in the event I didn't leave any permanent traces in the exhibition, as I was too busy watching other people responding to the instructions. In that sense it was a similar experience to the recent Tony Cragg exhibition (Please touch, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf), where the best thing was watching people interact with the sculptures, although the touching as such was fun too.

The room in the photo below, for instance, had lots of white walls to draw on and a white rowing boat in the middle, to leave messages on the theme of migration and refugees, with blue sharpies provided. Thankfully, the people willing to pay for a Yoko Ono exhibition appear to be a very sensible lot, so the quality of the contributions was a lot better than what you might find on other blank spaces. I also loved the multiple trophic layers of interactions: the artist, the participant, the participant's friend taking a photo, then me taking a photo of both:

own photo

More photos on my flickr.

abstract comparisons

I saw two amazing exhibitions on my recent visit to Düsseldorf, will rave about both in separate entries, starting with the one that is still running in case anybody out there gets the idea to go and see it:

Hilma af Klint und Wassily Kandinsky Träume von der Zukunft 16.3. — 11.8.2024

The exhibition at the Kunstsammlung NRW (K20) compares and contrasts the abstract paintings of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), who were near contemporaries and developed similar kinds of abstraction at around the same time - but independently of each other. There are all the obvious conclusions to draw from the fact that the male artist was successful in his lifetime whereas the female pendant was discovered long after they both died.

To me personally, the intriguing thing though was the contrast of the very familiar and the unknown. Kandinsky is very much the kind of art I grew up with, seeing the Folkwang Museum and the Kunstsammlung NRW were within daytrip distance. I don't have a record of my childhood exposure, but a lot of his work just looks like home to me. The most recent exhibition of his work I have seen before this one was at the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal in 2004: "Wassily Kandinsky: Der Klang der Farbe 1920-1921".

By contrast, I remembered Hilma af Klint's name only because it featured in a recent novel I read, namely Bed bug by Katherine Pancol. This French novel is set mainly in New York and it mentions the 2018/2019 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum which made Hilma af Klint postumously famous. The author couldn't really have known that the show would be such a success, as the novel appeared in the same year when it was on.

Her work very much feels like a foreign country - the colours and shapes are all different from what I'm used to in abstract art, but still it is all very interesting and intriguing. I am wondering how she arrived at all those shapes that are eerily reminiscent of molecular orbitals, long before quantum theory suggested those shapes for the clouds of electrons holding molecules together. There were some very impressive huge format paintings as well, and we overheard a helpful tour guide explaining how she painted those after placing her canvas flat on the floor. Long before Jackson Pollock, as the guide pointed out.

I'm loving the irony that a museum in Stockholm declined to accept her work as a gift in 1970, citing the parallels with Kandinsky as a reason for the rejection. So, well, see for yourself.

views of ships and cities

This blog's favourite industry painter, Alexander Calvelli, is opening his next exhibition this coming Sunday at Elmshorn (Schleswig-Holstein):

Schiffsblicke und Stadtsichten
opening Sunday 24.10. at 11am (until Nov 14)
Kunstverein Elmshorn
Torhaus Probstendamm 7
Elmshorn

more info (in German)

Here's a glimpse at a ship from the prospectus:

real life art

Art exhibition with works by Alexander Calvelli about real life (working lives) opening in real life today:

The venue, Kunstraum Eigelstein, does not seem to have a web presence outside Facebook - find them there if you must.

Angelica Kauffman

There is a brilliant exhibition of the 18th century portrait and history painter Angelica Kauffman (German spelling: Angelika Kauffmann) on at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf. I must have seen several of her works before, including a portrait of Goethe, and must have walked under four of her painting on the ceiling of the Royal Academy at Burlington House, but somehow never joined the dots and explored her life which was quite remarkable. So after seeing the exhibition earlier this week, I am now reading her biography to catch up.

In her time, she was famous as a portraitist, honing her skills first in Italy, where she allegedly painted "all the Englishmen" passing through on their Grand Tour, as well as other celebrities. Thanks to the contacts with the travelling Englishmen she was then able to move to London, establish herself as a history painter and became a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts.

The portraits are amazing, but what really makes her relevant to our times is the depiction of gender in her history paintings - she shows the heroes of Homer's epics as soft and feminine figures torn by hard decisions, and women like Penelope as strong forces for peace in a world shaped by male views of heroism and conflict. So she really did manage to impose her own viewpoint, in spite of some critics (like Schlegel) grumbling about her "inability" to paint proper male heroes.

This pioneering feminist perspective apparently helped her rediscovery and appraisal in the late 20th century (the biography I'm reading, written by Waltraud Maierhofer, dates from 1997), but I completely missed the memo back then. Partly explained by the fact that many of her works are in private collections still or in obscure museums, and exhibitions are few and far between. So go and see her work either now at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf (until 24.5.2020) or later this year at the Royal Academy London (28.6.-20.9.2020).




The artist torn between music and art - I can relate to that ...
[image source]


Check this thread of women painted by women ...

art and nature

Back in August I visited Olafur Eliasson's brilliant retrospective at the Tate Modern (still showing until Jan 5, 2020) and I was hoping to publish a photo story about it, but the exhibition allowed photography only for personal use, and the Ts and Cs for the use of the official photos somehow clashed with my publishers' conditions, so it didn't work out. So strictly non-commercially and for personal use only, I've put 15 of my own photos on flickr (see this album) and the text here:

The art of shaping our environment

Art reflects our environment. Art can also create new environments that we can enter to reflect on ourselves and our place in the world. In the Anthropocene, humanity is transforming the planet in many largely uncontrolled ways. Artists like Olafur Eliasson are reflecting on this transformation with their smaller, more controlled installations of artificial environments.

Eliasson, whose works are currently featured in a major retrospective at the Tate Modern in London, UK, rose to fame in 2003 with “The Weather Project” for which he installed a gigantic sunset in the turbine hall of the same gallery. The retrospective now shows how his dialogue with nature evolved from structural aspects to perceptions of environment and climate. The show includes indoor installations of a very dense fog, rain on a window, water waves, a moss wall and a rainbow of sorts.

The environment is only one side of the equation, however. What turns the boxed weather phenomena into art is the observation of how humans interact with them, how they disappear in the fog or marvel at the water features. Accordingly, many other works are providing the visitor with an environment where they see themselves – as colourful shadows, for instance, or as fragmented reflections when they walk through a multi-faceted kaleidoscope.

The take-home message seems to be: We are our environment, our environment is us, all is one dynamic system. That can be more easily grasped on the scale of an art gallery, but it is also true for planet Earth.




(own photo)

harz heritage

The industry painter Alexander Calvelli is having a busy time opening two exhibitions in the Harz area this weekend, both covering motifs found in the natural and cultural heritage of that area.

One at The Cistercian Museum Walkenried Monastery today:




The other opens at the World Heritage Site Rammelsberg tomorrow, see the announcement here, and runs until October 27.


Some local press coverage I just found:

Walkenrieder Nachrichten

Göttinger Tageblatt

heads of the dead

today's issue of Current Biology includes a special section on the "Biology of Death". My contribution was inspired by the recent exhibition "The Skull - Icon. Myth. Cult." which I saw at the UNESCO World Heritage Site Völklingen Ironworks near Saarbrücken, Germany, back in May, as well as by the famous shrunken heads at Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum, not far from our home. The feature rounds up various ways in which different cultures have preserved and manipulated the heads of family, friends and foes for various reasons.

Read all about it:

Heads of the dead

Current Biology Volume 26, Issue 13, pR544–R547, 11 July 2016

FREE access to HTML full text and PDF download

The Latmul in Papua New Guinea honoured notable ancestors by sculpting a new, beautiful face onto their exhumed skulls, using clay and shells. This is an example from the Gabriel Max collection. (own photo)

melting points

Alexander Calvelli's latest exhibition, Schmelzpunkte (melting points) opens today at Henrichshütte Hattingen, Germany. It runs until October 23rd, opening times Tue-Sun 10-18h, Fri till 20h.

Am E-Ofen. Georgsmarienhütte, 2001.
Foto: Alexander Calvelli

Here's the press release from the museum (seems to be available in German only, sorry!):

"Schmelzpunkte" heißt eine neue Ausstellung mit Gemälden des Kölner Künstlers Alexander Calvelli, die der Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe (LWL) vom 17. Juni bis 23. Oktober in seinem Industriemuseum Henrichshütte Hattingen (Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis) zeigt. In einer historischen Halle präsentiert das LWL-Museum rund 150 Gemälde des Künstlers. Darüber hinaus laden einige der Bilder im Außengelände zum direkten Vergleich zwischen dem Motiv und seiner künstlerischen Bearbeitung ein. "So treten Industriekultur und Malerei in ein besonderes Spannungsverhältnis", sagte Kurator Dr. Olaf Schmidt-Rutsch vom LWL-Industriemuseum am Montag (13.6.) bei der Vorstellung der Ausstellung in Hattingen.

"Ich male vergängliche Architektur" - mit diesem Satz beschreibt Calvelli sein Werk und verbindet so inhaltlich die nahezu fotorealistische Darstellung von Blumen mit den Motiven der Schwerindustrie. Letztere bilden den Mittelpunkt der Ausstellung. Schmelzpunkte stehen dabei für Transformationsprozesse: Mit den Aggregatzuständen ändern sich Strukturen und Gefüge. Metalle werden aus Erzen erschmolzen, umgeschmolzen, in Formen gegossen und geformt. In Konverter und Elektroofen löst sich alter Schrott auf, bevor er erneut in Form gebracht einem neuen Nutzungszyklus zugeführt wird. Diese Transformationsprozesse prägen das Erscheinungsbild des Strukturwandels.

So spannen die Gemälde Calvellis den Bogen vom Erz zum Schrott, vom Ursprung zum Niedergang. Sie zeigen mittelständische Betriebe und Großkonzerne, archaisch wirkende Kleinschmieden und gigantische Schmiedepressen. Die Darstellungen von längst verschwundenen Werken, aktiven Arbeitsstätten und im industriekulturellen Kontext neu entdeckten Anlagen vermitteln einen Eindruck von den Wandlungsprozessen, denen die Montanindustrie seit jeher ausgesetzt ist.

"Die Gemälde Calvellis ziehen den Betrachter durch den hohen Realismus in ihren Bann. Die Strukturen der Arbeitsorte treten plastisch hervor. Es braucht eine Zeit intensiver Betrachtung, um zu erkennen, wie künstlerische Akzentuierungen die scheinbare Realität bewusst verfremden", so Olaf Schmidt-Rutsch. "Der intensive Blick in die Werke vermittelt einen nachhaltigen Eindruck von der Arbeit mit glühenden Metallen. Tatsächlich geht es nicht um die Dokumentation industrieller Anlagen oder die Illustration technischer Prozesse, sondern um die kritische und distanzierte Auseinandersetzung mit den Zeugnissen des Industriezeitalters."

Bei der Eröffnung am Freitag (17.6.) um 19.30 Uhr wird der Künstler anwesend sein. Die musikalische Begleitung erfolgt durch den Klangkünstler Georg Zangl. Gäste sind herzlich willkommen. Der Eintritt ist frei.

Schmelzpunkte: Alexander Calvelli - Industriemalerei
17. Juni bis 23. Oktober 2016
LWL-Industriemuseum Henrichshütte Hattingen
Werksstraße 31-33
Geöffnet Di-So 10-18 Uhr, Fr -20 Uhr

source

Alexander Calvelli @ Freudenthaler Sensenhammer

The painter Alexander Calvelli, whose work I have been following for a while, has a new exhibition coming up at a small museum in Leverkusen, the Freudenthaler Sensenhammer (a place where they used to make scythes). I just love the name of the place, and Alexander tells me it's a lovely little museum mainly run by volunteers.

The exhibiton Alexander Calvelli - Hämmer & Sicheln - Arbeitswelten opens on the evening of Oct. 23rd:

11. Leverkusener Kunstnacht
Freitag, 23.10.2015, 19.00 Uhr (Einlass 18.00 Uhr)
details

Calvelli at Braunschweig

I've been following the work of industry painter Alexander Calvelli for many years now (I happen to know him as he's the son of my PhD supervisor) and wrote a feature about him in Chemie in unserer Zeit back in 2002.

His latest exhibition is now on at the Jakobs-Kemenate Braunschweig (Brunswick) and shows his perspective on a range of industries found in and around that city, producing useful stuff from sugar to pianos:

Alexander Calvelli
"Zwischen Zucker und Zink - Gemälde einer unzugänglichen Welt"
18. September bis 9. November 2014

His work isn't very well represented on the web, but I pinched this postage-stamp sized reproduction of one of his new works from the exhibition website:

Braunschweig Hafen (source)

turning the world upside down

After the Science is Vital demo on Saturday, I revisited Anish Kapoor's mirrors in Kensington Gardens, this time all polished and without fencing. Love the way they inspire people to interact, eg by turning themselves upside down to look at the upside down reflection:




or by lifting things high up to see them in this one:




The clear sky mirror, with its frameless, very sharp border reminds me of Philip Pullman's subtle knife, which cuts windows into the fabric of our universe to give access to parallel universes. In this case, the universe behind the mirror seems to be sunnier than ours:




Couldn't think of much to say about the red-tinged sky mirror, so I hired a duck to swim across its reflection:



The exhibition website isn't finished yet apparently, but you can pick up a leaflet containing a map with the location of the works from the Serpentine Gallery or the Red Pavilion next door.

london art and architecture

Busy day at London yesterday - saw the Gauguin exhibition at Tate Modern on its first day:



I'm afraid I have to agree with the review in the Evening Standard - a biographical approach would have been more enlightening. Gauguin only discovered art in his 20s and became a professional painter in his 30s, then turned his back on the Parisian art scene to live in the South Pacific. Just how this unusual biography came to happen doesn't become clear in the exhibition.

I caught the tail end of the exhibition "Exposed" as well - Tate Modern offers a very affordable combined ticket for the two events while they overlap. More on that exhibition some other time.

I also visited the allegedly ugliest new building in the UK:




and still find it beautiful. What most puzzles me about the "ugly award" is that if you look round Elephant & Castle everything else (shopping centre, 60s tower blocks) is truly hideous, so the one way in which the "owl" doesn't fit in is that it is more beautiful than everything within a mile radius. (It isn't in fact substantially higher than the surrounding tower blocks.) Pleased to see that the Latin American restaurant "La Bodeguita" is still there in the Elephant & Castle shopping centre, it has in fact a perfect view onto the front side of the owl.

And I saw Anish Kapoor's mirrors in Hyde Park:



and the red pavillion at the Serpentine Gallery of which I posted a few (all-red) images on my flickr photostream.

Oh and I had a coffee that was just the right size:



Perfect day.

Henry Moore at Tate Britain

I enjoyed visiting the Henry Moore exhibition at the Tate Britain yesterday, just in the nick of time as it closes at the end of next week.



(one of his reclining figures in elm wood)
More photos from my visit to the Tate here.

I liked the early work especially, but also the reclining figures he did throughout his career. Should visit the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green, too.

PS As a former ribosome researcher, I tend to see the crude structures of the ribosome in Moore's abstracted "mother-and-child" pieces. I think one of them appeared on the cover of one of the ribosome books in the 90s. How amazingly prescient of Moore to sculpt the ribosome decades before scientists figured out its shape.

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In other arts news, I also visited the Howard Hodgkin exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, but didn't quite know what to make of it. The Guardian's Jonathan Jones managed to write an interesting article about it though: Howard Hodgkin - the last English romantic painter

ghost forest

An art installation of gigantic tree trunks from African rainforests, meant to highlight the alarming depletion of the world's natural resources, and in particular the continued deforestation, has just turned up outside Oxford's University Museum:







More about the project: Ghost Forest Art Project.

For other events lined up in the year of the University Museum's 150th anniversary, click here

Update (30.7.2012): The Ghost Forest has now moved on to its final resting place, at the National Botanic Gardens of Wales in Carmarthenshire (ITV news coverage).

magnificent maps

On my last visit to London, I had a few hours spare and went to the Magnificent Maps exhibition at the British Library, just because it happened to be on my way. Found it really interesting in the way it shows the different ways in which maps have been used in different contexts - each represented by a room of the venue, e.g. the audience chamber, the bedchamber, the merchant's house, etc.

I actually tend to put maps on my walls as well, have a huge pseudo-realistic view of Europe on display, and an aerial photograph of Oxford (kind of a map as well). Sad though that satnavs and google maps will drive all map makers out of business, so I'm not sure whether there will be any maps from the 21st century to feature in future exhibitions.

Magnificent Maps continues until Sept.19

artweeks

Oxford city's art week has started today (the north of the county a week earlier, the south a week later). As in the last few years, I am disappointed that artists seem to have evaporated from our neighbourhood. Around 2000, there were three exhibitions in our road, and a few more in the surrounding area, now there is nothing. If that state of affair continues, I will have to show my own works, and you'll all be sorry ...

Meanwhile, we have to cycle down to the city centre, Jericho, and Summertown areas, where there are so many exhibitions in a small space that you can easily spend a day crawling from one site to the next. To start it off slowly, I've just visited one site (a small gallery that I hadn't seen before) in Jericho. Will check more as the week progresses.

alexander calvelli

The painter Alexander Calvelli, who specializes in industrial structures (working and decaying ones), has a new exhibition, which opened at the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum at Bremerhaven last Sunday. It's called Werften, Schiffe, Häfen, so supposedly it's all about shipyards, ships and harbours. The exhibition will remain there until spring 2009.

His work isn't all that well represented on the web, but there is a small gallery of his previous work.

artweeks

I really like the Oxford Artweeks which is when hundreds of artists (professional and amateur alike) display there work either in their own homes or in public buildings like schools and churches. The events are already running in the county this week, and will hit the city next Saturday 17th, so I can have a nice walkabout and see some art I wouldn't otherwise be able to see.

What troubles me a little bit, though, is that the artists seem to have vanished from our neighbourhood. Back in 2000/01 there were 2 or 3 exhibitions in our street, and a few more in nearby streets, and now there is nothing. I have to go to the city centre or to North Oxford to get my art fix. Not sure what happened there ...