Hardly anyone has captured the horrors of the First World War in pictures as ruthlessly and harrowingly as Otto Dix. Images whose urgency is so close to us and which reach right up to the present day.

Since 1993, his work cycle"The War" has travelled around the world in a touring exhibition organized by ifa - Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen. The ifa Gallery Stuttgart is now bringing it into dialog with contemporary positions from the ifa art collection: six artists who work with video and performance have selected etchings from the cycle for the exhibition "What is in Reality" and juxtaposed them with their own works. The war is both a testimony and a memorial and emerges directly from Dix's experiences as a soldier. The invited artists open up new dimensions of his work and make connections to themes such as trauma, collective memory, violence, repression, the body, landscape, ideology and absurdity.

What is in reality
Yvon Chabrowski, Sven Johne, Lisa Kohl, Georg Lutz, Raphael Sbrzesny and Maya Schweizer in dialog with Otto Dix

Curated by Bettina Korintenberg and Susanne Weiß

Exhibition: October 4 - 14, 2025

Artist talk: October 4, 2025, 5-6:30 p.m.

Tandem tour: Dix at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and the ifa-Galerie Stuttgart:

October 11, 2025, start: 12 noon at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart with director Ulrike Groos, end at the ifa-Galerie Stuttgart

Lunch matinée: October 11, 2025, 2 pm, ifa Gallery Stuttgart, Gitte Zschoch, Secretary General of ifa, Ellen Strittmatter, Head of the Art Department of ifa, and Philip Kurz, CEO Wüstenrot Foundation, talk about the significance and future of the ifa art collection.

Special opening hours ifa Gallery Stuttgart: daily 12-19 h

Guided tour through the exhibition: daily at 5 pm