Karlsruhe is in the Focus of Art

The thirteenth art KARLSRUHE opens its doors in February 2016.

Be it painting or sculpture, drawing, graphic prints, multiples or photography: Covering an area of roughly 35,000 m2, a clearly structured, graceful architectural landscape of art is being created to encourage intensive examination, concentrated discussion and relaxing shopping. “We don’t set any trends ourselves,” says Britta Wirtz, managing director of the trade fair centre: "but we do note which galleries represent established positions and those that venturesomely endeavour to seek out and publicly present fresh artistic talent.”

This strategy has proven its worth: 211 galleries from 13 countries are participating in the coming event - 18 to 21 February - and will be displaying 100 years of art history between the poles of classic modern and contemporary art.

art KARLSRUHE: “People.Market. Art” is the slogan for the thirteenth edition of this internationally oriented art fair in Germany’s southwest, and the organisers are anticipating again 50,000 visitors.

Thorsten Sadowsky, director of the Kirchner Museum in Davos, will be staging an extensive special exhibition for the Kirchner Foundation, guesting in Karlsruhe in 2016, with works by the expressionist, setting an unusual focus on the basis of the photographic legacy of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Of the roughly 12,000 works that the Swiss museum has collected, approximately 1500 are photographs by the artist. Sadowsky: “Kirchner was not only an artist who worked as if intoxicated but also a veritable archivist with a distinct propensity for systemisation.” As such, the intention behind the exhibition entitled “The painter as a photographer” planned in Hall 1 is partly to show the interplay between painting, graphics, and photography but partly to prove too that Kirchner also took still-life and documentary photographs. Roughly a quarter of the photographs document his surroundings, people, and landscapes; photos that he had sometimes used as inspiration for his compositions, as Thorsten Sadowsky clearly illustrates. The appropriate images of his work can be found on our website.

Curator Ewald Karl Schrade: “I regard it as additional acknowledgement of our efforts when our newcomers in the classic modern section include an internationally respected and idolised exhibitor, namely Galerie Utermann from Dortmund, now in the fourth generation of family ownership.” More contemporary art will be on display, too, when gallery owners such as Ernst Hilger of Vienna and Brigitte Holbein-March of Stuttgart, return as exhibitors in 2016. The Meyer Riegger gallery of Berlin/Karlsruhe, represented at the press conference by Thomas Riegger, is now able to take part for the first time, having been previously prevented from doing so overlapping dates with other art fairs. He conceded that he and his partner had been thinking about taking part for quite some time and used images to convey what the gallery is planning to exhibit. (ps)