Tübke und Italien

In the organizer's words:

The Leipzig painter and draughtsman Werner Tübke (1929-2004) is one of the most prominent artistic personalities of the GDR. Since taking over the holdings of the Tübke Foundation in 2022, the MdbK has preserved almost the entire estate of the artist and is committed to the scholarly study of his oeuvre. The MdbK is taking the 20th anniversary of Werner Tübke's death as an opportunity to shed new light on his work. From the 1970s onwards, Tübke undertook several trips to Italy, which was inaccessible to many of his compatriots at the time. Intensive experiences in places such as Venice, Milan, Florence, Rome, Capri and Sicily have since been reflected in his work in a variety of ways. Italy also marked a turning point in his own career: a solo exhibition at Emilio Bertonati's gallery in Milan in 1971 marked his international breakthrough as an artist.

Against the background of the idealizing image of Italy in the European art tradition and the contrasting, decidedly political position of an Italian contemporary such as Renato Guttuso, Tübke's own multi-layered image of Italy emerges. The juxtaposition with high-ranking works by Jacopo Pontormo and Agnolo Bronzino (Uffizi, Florence) underlines Tübke's elective affinity with the eccentric Florentine Mannerists of the 16th century. In his numerous self-portraits, the painter consciously plays with the conventions of Italian models in the sense of a programmatic self-staging. The ambivalence of Tübke's experience of Italy is particularly evident in his Sicilian society portraits, whose sometimes morbid vocabulary betrays distance and conjures up dark memories of the south. Tübke's reception of Italy thus proves to be a strategy of an individualistic view of art that oscillates between classical aesthetics and a subversive desire for contradiction.

The exhibition in five rooms in the context of the Leipzig picture cosmos shows paintings, prints and hand drawings from lenders in Germany and abroad alongside the museum's own holdings. It was created in collaboration with the Institute of Art History at Leipzig University.

Sponsors: Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation, KYTHERA Cultural Foundation, VNG Foundation, Tübke Foundation Leipzig