Grads spent the day visiting many galleries and museums.

To start the day, students visited Gemäldegalerie, featuring about 1,200 masterpieces by many major artists from different schools of painting and stylistic periods. Core focal points in the collection are German and Italian painting of the 13th to 16th century and Netherlandish painting of the 15th and 16th century. The collection of paintings from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance ranges from the great Italian masters Giotto, Fra Angelico, Raphael and Titian to the richly detailed pictures of Pieter Bruegel, via the Flemish master Jan van Eyck and the most notable figures in early German painting of the Gothic and Renaissance periods such as Konrad Witz, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein.

Afterwards, they visited the Neue Nationalgalerie where they explored Monica Bonvicini’s site-specific installation, “I do You”, which represents a feminist appropriation of the space conceived by Mies van der Rohe, which she fundamentally changes by means of architectural interventions. In addition to the architectural interventions, selected sculptural works from Bonvicini’s oeuvre were on display, with which visitors could also interact, such as her usable “Chainswings”.

Downstairs, they viewed the collection with works from 1900 to 1945 is titled The Art of Society, featuring a variety of perspectives on the erratic transition of art styles, including Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Dada and New Objectivity. The exhibition focused on social themes, such as the big city, the German Lebensreform (life and reform) movement, politics and propaganda, exile, and war. The exhibition presented about 250 works of Classical Modernism by artists including Otto Dix, Hannah Höch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lotte Laserstein and Renée Sintenis. Works by internationally active women artists have been included via loans, such as Hilma af Klint or Irma Stern. Two films by artists Julian Rosefeldt and Javier Téllez provided a contemporary critique of modernism.

In the afternoon, they took a tour of Katharina Grosse’s completely new body of work on canvas from the past year, Spectrum without Traces, at Galerie Max Hetzler. She limited her palette to six colors, which were sprayed unmixed onto the canvases. Multiple paintings were made simultaneously and belong to the same family, but the way the colors mingle differed per painting.

Students also took a tour through the Reiter Galleries and viewed Ecstatic Echoes, featuring contemporary artists, Kyra Tabea Balderer and Ellen Möckel. Media translation processes are essential means of their work and both are interested in the interrelations between creatively intended procedures and (sometimes only limited controllable) influences of reproduction technology or machinery. From this point on, however, two very different works develop, which the joint show sets in relation to each other.

To wrap up the day, grads visited Galerie Judin to see the exhibition, My Eyes See Only What’s Not in Front of Me, by artist Ellen Akimoto. Akimoto’s paintings mostly show interiors and people. Mysterious narratives unfold in them, eluding straightforward readings and always remaining enigmatic. It comes as no surprise that the artist draws on photoshopped collages for the larger compositions.