Illusions / Illusionen Beeskow – Łódź 2015

Little is known in Poland about life in the former GDR. For more than forty years, we Poles belonged to the same Eastern Bloc, yet our lives were different: many things were not straightforward, but they were possible. For our neighbours, matters looked different. We also know little about the art of the former East German state, although in this respect our knowledge differs little from anyone else’s. As Marta Skłodowska observes in her essay published in this catalogue: “Twenty-five years have now passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the Cold War that divided Germany along the boundaries of the Soviet and American occupation zones — and it remains unclear how art from East Germany should be treated.” Jagoda Barczyńska, the author of another essay in the catalogue, states that an important element in the art of the former GDR was “the need to create a new model of the human being, one who, rejecting the destructive doctrine of fascism, wished to build their world on the ideological principles of equality and social justice”. Agata Mendrychowska, meanwhile, notes that the works gathered in one of the archives of GDR art “are often intriguing, yet their cultural context remains uncertain because the artistic production held at the Kunstarchiv Beeskow is bound up with the history and reality of the GDR”.

The exhibition Illusions. Beeskow – Łódź 2015 presents a selection from the Kunstarchiv Beeskow made by Jagoda Barczyńska, Agata Mendrychowska and Marta Skłodowska. The Kunstarchiv Beeskow holds more than twenty thousand works of art and other objects from the GDR era. During the state’s existence, they belonged to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), social organisations, GDR state institutions, the GDR Cultural Fund and the East Berlin municipal authorities. Most of the works entered the Kunstarchiv Beeskow collection from holiday centres, directors’ offices, training centres, guest houses and staff canteens.

The exhibition at Atlas Sztuki was proposed by Rüdiger Freiherr von Fritsch, Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to Poland from 2010 to 2014. His stories about encounters with East German art assembled in the former SED Central Committee building in Berlin prompted our interest in the Kunstarchiv Beeskow holdings. Following German reunification, the building housed the Federal Foreign Office in the 1990s, when Ambassador von Fritsch had the opportunity to work there.

Illusions. Beeskow – Łódź 2015 addresses the blurred boundaries between public and private space, examining not only art history but also the experiences of people living under political control. It presents works by numerous artists active in the former GDR, including such well-known figures as Neo Rauch, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Thomas Ziegler, Sybille Bergemann and Walter Womacka. Alongside their works, we will show pieces selected from the Beeskow archive by lesser-known and even entirely unknown artists.

The exhibition at Atlas Sztuki demonstrates that the new chapter in European history following the fall of the Iron Curtain is a reality. Enough time has passed for us to look anew at the period before 1989 through the prism of the present. I invite you to Atlas Sztuki to see how we perceive something that, years later, no longer exists — or perhaps never truly existed — and how vision was distorted, quite apart from outright misinterpretation.