With "Outrageously expressive", the mpk is dedicating itself to the powerful forms of expressionism. Around 80 works by artists of the "Brücke" and the "Blaue Reiter" show vividly how a generation renewed art and society with radical imagery.
Street fights, exuberant dance evenings, voyeuristic bathing scenes, the self - Expressionism of the 1910-20s is the "expression" of a newly awakened attitude to life. The artists no longer saw themselves represented in traditional academic art. Their aspiration was to create honest, direct art, born of feeling and individual experience. The energy of this generation of artists was discharged in dynamic, reduced, raw, often deformed pictorial compositions. The mpk is showing around 80 works from its extensive collection of graphic art as well as some works on loan from private collections. These include important artists from the "Die Brücke" group, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Max Pechstein, and from the "Der Blaue Reiter" group, including Franz Marc, August Macke and Alexej von Jawlensky.
In a thematic expansion, Dr. Sören Fischer, head of the Graphic Arts Collection at the mpk, explores the exhibition and acquisition policy under its first post-war director Carl Maria Kiesel. Particular attention will be paid to the question of the extent to which Kiesel and his team exhibited and purchased works by expressionist artists who had been ostracized and persecuted during the Nazi dictatorship after 1947 in order to re-establish and rehabilitate them in the consciousness of the German public and in the context of the re-democratization of society.
September 20, 2025 to January 18, 2026
