Avatar und Atavismus

The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf abruptly lays an archetypical anchor in the art of the 1980 with their exhibition „AVATAR AND ATAVISM“: Renowned exponents of Western art belonging to different generations were the ones who revolted against the achievements of modernism, abstraction and conceptuality in a way in which these have never been addressed before. Employing a process of assembling and juxtaposing works of art they visualize a phenomenon in which a surprising emergence of heads, hands and other bodily signals brings animistic moments in play, that express themselves in the “fragmented body”, in the animal as alter ego as well as other codes of the “Savage Mind”.

Thereby the exhibition features works by renowned artists that veer between obsession, narration and irony, as had become possible after the post-modern turn of 1978. Works from the Paul Maenz Collection opens the “savage” decade with names like Francesco Clemente, Walter Dahn, Martin Disler and Georg Jiri Dokoupil. They are followed by works of a Siegfried Anzinger, flanked by such singular figures as Antonius Höckelmann and Alfred Klinkan. The subsequent decade is distinguished by an animistic chain of works by artists who invent new avatars: Franz West, Rosemarie Trockel, Günther Förg, Thomas Schütte and Mike Kelley: West’s lemurs, Förg’s masks and Trockel’s knitted “Balaclava” ski masks.