In the second of his two lectures Ben Street will show how the country that had created a wealth of avant-garde art during the 1920s was left image dead for about twenty years: a ground zero from a somehow enforced visual amnesia and a need to invent new imagery to recreate a national identity.
The project seemingly fuelled the artistic mission of three painters in particular: Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter; artists whose practice has stood out beyond the efforts of any other recent painter longing for appreciation of national essence; not to exhume history’s painful memories, not to redeem their country, but to do a collective act of memory for a society that didn’t want to forget, but didn’t know how to remember.
Even if they all refer to themselves as apolitical, their art continues to shape the world’s positive image of a new, different Germany to this day.
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