The exhibit, organised by Magdalena Moeller, director of the Brüke Museum in Berlin, and by Roland Scotti, director of the Kirchner Museum in Davos, shows about 150 works between painting and graphics and goes through all artistic and existential stages of the artist, who committed suicide in 1938. Lived in a period of violent contrasts, in an Europe that was distraught by the experience of the First World War and by the advent of Nazism, Kirchner was able to become an interpreter of the moral malaise of modern society. His figures are twisted, tragically upset in their shape through an immediate and immensely powerful stroke. Strong and resolute colours, violent and broken lines are the distinctive mark of this man, a rebel in life and in art.

Starting the journey is the well known «Marcella», a portrait of the model preferred by the artist; and immediately after appear the splendid canvases dedicated to Berlin life, where rich ladies adorned with feathered hats become an expressive vehicle of that moral decadence which will soon strike the whole of Europe involving it in the tragic war experience. The exhibit gives ample space also to other pictorial genres - nudes and landscapes - which the artist undertook and also contemplates his production from the last period with less known works, albeit of great intensity. Also his graphic art expresses itself thorough a bodied linearity, letting bodies and faces declare themselves through a form reduced to the essence by an instinctive and brutal stroke. Here that tragic vision of life and the world which will be the basis for Expressionism is born.

Keeping a continuity with previous exhibitions, among which the one recently dedicated to «Die Brüke» painters, Fondazione Mazzotta offers an exhibition of very high quality, dedicated not just to graphical work, but capable of offering a complete view of the production of one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

«Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, fondatore e interprete dell'espressionismo. Dipinti, acquerelli, grafiche e disegni»
Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta
When: Until 9 June 2002
Where: Foro Buonaparte 50, Milan
Opening times: 10 am - 7:30 pm; Tuesdays and Thursdays 10 am - 10:30 pm; closed Mondays
Tickets: € 8; € 5,50/4,50 conc.
Mazzotta Catalogue, € 25 at the exhibit
Info: 02 878 197
Mail

May.2002

Fondazione Mazzotta (In Italian)
Kirchner Museum