Art in Zwickau – Exhibition “Solar seeker”: Food like the gods

When it comes to the art of order in the GDR, the derogatory word “uncertainty” quickly falls. This usually says those who do not know what they are talking about, but they still have a lot to say, for example as curators of large exhibitions or chair owners at universities.

Paul Kaiser has already dedicated an important exhibition in the new Saxon gallery in Chemnitz to the largest art collector and patron in the GDR, the bismuth. Now he curated an even more comprehensive in the old building wool spinning mill in Zwickau. However, showing the legendary art collection of bismuth encountered adversity -related adversity: it was almost completely gone! What was hung in canteens, administrative buildings, holiday homes or polyclinics once included around 10,000 works.

However, art played no role in the handling of bismuth – often the pictures were simply thrown on the trash when buildings were cleared. Only the resolute use of individual painters in the early 1990s is thanks to a part. In the meantime, a secure stock of 4,200 works of 475 artists who belong to Wismut Stiftung GmbH today are assumed. What is still to become huge is completely open. The money is missing for proper storage, even restoration.

Since there were also numerous painting and graphics circles in bismuth, the judgments about art were soon at a high level.

Why is this collection of such great importance? First, because it is a mirror of GDR history, from the special perspective of bismuth, the state in the state. Secondly, because an aesthetic change within the representation of the world of work in the GDR can be shown here over the age of 40, which amazes not prejudice. It turns out that this was a protected space for the most diverse art forms, not just the requested production illustration. They only existed at the beginning, and there was already a large number of individual manuscripts.

The not (be) respect for the art of bismuth is particularly fatal because the history of bismuth in the GDR always had something mysterious, you knew little about it – hardly anything has changed to this day. The veil already began with the name Wismut, a chemical element, which this was not about. From 1947, uranium was promoted in the Erzgebirge from 1947 for the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program – and at all costs.

Initially, the state stock corporation (SAG) was subordinate to the Soviet Ministry of the Interior, the Soviets checked the uranium mining, strictly shielded from the outside world. Almost 60 percent of the uranium for Soviet nuclear weapons came from the Ore Mountains. In addition to the USA and Canada, the GDR was the world’s largest uranium conveyor. At the end of the 1940s, almost half a million people worked here, and they were often compulsorily obliged. 70 workers were sentenced and executed by 1953 for (supposed or actual) sabotage or espionage by Soviet military tribunals. The bismuth: a focal point of the nuclear arms arms with all its side effects.

In 1954, bismuth was transferred to a Soviet-German stock corporation (SDAG), the course was more moderate. Instead of forced labor, high salaries and special care were now attracted. In 1989, 25,000 employees still worked here. The work in the Uranbergbau high-security area was not openly documented until the end, which gives the visual art so special when it comes to the position of bismuth within the GDR society. Konrad Wolf had already dared a cinematic approach to the topic of uranium mining in 1958, which was then promptly banned.

So now the exhibition of the same name “sun seeker” in Zwickau. From Carl-Heinz Westenburger we see the spring drawing “shaft Johann Georgenstadt” from 1956. A fenced area in which a temporary tower in the middle is evaluating-a conveyor tower that could also be considered to be the watch tower of a penalty camp here. The visual certificates are still rare.

With the Bitterfelder Weg from 1959, the pictures were not only more numerous, but also very quickly. The artists were actually in close contact with the workers of bismuth. They visited themselves alternately in the painter studio or in the mine (from 1970 artists were also allowed to enter the shafts); One was up to date on the work of the other. Since there were also numerous painting and graphics circles in bismuth, the judgments about art were soon at a high level.

This is evidenced by a documentary about the work of Frank Ruddigkeit on his triptych “working day of a miner” (1986 to 1989). Every cliché of socialist realism is destroyed here with hammer blows. The proximity to the Leipzig school shows up with the expressive-symbolistic influences by Willi Sitte, Bernhard Heisig or Wolfgang Mattheuer. When ruddness, the workers appear to be torn into the glowing light from the depth of the mountain. Where did you land – in the trench of a battle? The apocalyptic threat of the uranium reveals ruddness.

Destruction is an important topic for the painters, as well as hope for rescue. A typical bismuth painter was Werner Petzold, who became the formal renewer of the workers’ image. No heroes of depth, blackened in the fight with ore and dust, but cyberktikers on an expedition to the realm of numbers and formulas, the “Brigade Rose” from 1970 stands here in front of us. Petzold fled to the west in 1983, where he then made a name for himself as an altar image painter.

The change of workers’ portraits to be visited here is striking. While Carl Kuhn paints the legendary flagship worker of the Wismut Sepp in the pose of the patriarch in 1965, Siegfried Otto-Hüttengrund in 1987 showed us the Brigadier Günter Franke as a closed, highly skeptical person who looks down instead of looking down and spreads an aura of distance. This has become of the hero of the work, as the Bitterfelder Weg once propagated,, albeit from the same floor, an antihero who refuses to all roles that it is supposed to play.

This extensive exhibition is a kind of baroque wonder chamber. You meet new names and subjects. So the Russian Viktor Makayev paints “The Pyramids of the 20th Century” – huge overbearing cone. There is nothing more on the image dipped into the dim light. Of the Alexandra Müller-Jontschewa (who became one of the great discoveries of this exhibition in 1948), bismuth even bought a self-portrait in 1979.

Müller-Jontschewa regularly increased the Erzgebirge landscape to surrealistic, a dark threat, from which it cries out for redemption. The religious moment that always resonates with her is then unprotected in a sports picture. In “Boxer in the ropes”, Müller-Jontschewa shows Jesus as crucified in 1983-with boxing gloves. This is by no means meant ironically, but portrays a sacrificed one that already seems rush. Surely surprisingly, the way in the bismuth painters appears how to deal with subjects-and those responsible for art of bismuth must have “their” painters blindly. That makes it so interesting today.

I stand amazed in front of the big murals Kurt Hanfs. Only individual segments of the two -meter -high and eleven meter wide image “From the depth we promote the sun” from 1971 can be shown here. The technology alone is amazing: oil on aluminum! The surface cools down through the colors. The mural was an order for the dining room of the Schmirchau business culture house. Smart in the metaphorical increased scenes, fairytale collages: a composition in which life and work combine in a joyful way. The utopia in it: So the gods feed – or the workers in socialism!

»Sun seeker! Art and mining of bismuth «, historic cotton mill, Pöblitzer Str. 9 in Zwickau, until August 10th.