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.

After a long train ride to Berlin, grads took a trip to the Berlin Zoo for relaxation and inspiration.

Grads returned to the Philara Collection in Düsseldorf for the big opening of “I’ve Only Got Eyes on You”, featuring many contemporary artists acquired in the last two years.

The artists featured used collage, painting, sculpture and photography for figurative representations that address both personal and wider societal issues. With and within the works, they explored and extended definitions of the portraits. The focus of the artists in the exhibition ranged across themes of visibility and representation, and discourses on decoloniality and post-humanity, meeting these challenges with images that seek to make our reality more bearable.

Grads visited the opening of contemporary artist Antonia Freisburger’s “Trust Issues” at Galerie Droste in Düsseldorf.

Freisburger creates surreal visual worlds that emanate from her fascination with everything unknown in our universe. With painterly condensations of multiple layers, free-flowing surfaces, and colorful, luminous, expanding forms, the artist attempts to approach the unspeakable with her sensitivity to the environment. Immersing viewer’s in a reality that seems fictitious, independent of time and place. 

In her first solo exhibition at Galerie Droste, the new series of works expresses Freisburger’s identity as an external manifestation of herself. Based on the cosmos as the origin of inspiration, the focus shifted to the constant expansion of ego consciousness, the body, sexuality. All this is preceded by emotional ambivalence, a fear of one’s own finiteness that is only too readily repressed. The vague longing for infinity and the simultaneous awe and sadness that the dimensions of the universe will probably never be tangible, even if we try to make the unspeakable sayable and to derive our own, superior reality, a “super-reality”.

Grads visited the K21 museum in Düsseldorf to see Jenny Holzer’s exhibition.

Holzer is an American artist known for her thought provoking installations that combine text and light. Her works often address issues of power, violence, gender, and challenge viewers to question their own assumptions and beliefs.

Grads also explored the international contemporary art sections from the art collection of North Rhine-Westphalia which concentrate on the new acquisitions of recent years. Works from the collection by Ed Atkins, Lutz Bacher, Simon Denny, Sabrina Fritsch, Isa Genzken, Carsten Nicolai, Hito Steyerl and Raqs Media Collective are shown in individual rooms. The presentation of the collection also includes photographs by Thomas Struth, which, like the large installations by Reinhard Mucha and Tomás Saraceno, have long been part of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Grads visited the opening of māteriālia in Düsseldorf featuring contemporary artists Inma Femenía, Lucila Pacheco Dehne, Fabian Ramírez, Klara Virnich, and Denise Werth.

During the opening viewers were surprised by the sudden performance of Klara Virnich.

The grads visited Noemi Weber’s studio in Düsseldorf and were provided the opportunity to meet individually for critique.

Weber is a visual artist based in Düsseldorf, whose work spans across painting, sculpture, and space. She studied under Katharina Grosse at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Her work is focused on exploring the essence of painting and redefining its possibilities, and it showcases a variety of expressive forms and exhibition modes.

In her current works, Weber examines the interplay between material, color, and space on the one hand, and the viewer’s perceptual paradigms on the other. She sheds light on the fascinating relationship between these elements and how they can be manipulated to create new meanings and experiences. Recently, she has conducted painting experiments by collaborating with her sister’s dance performances, using them as a form of painting gesture.

Graduate students attended the opening “Conversion” featuring Ralf Brueck.

Brueck is a younger exponent of the Düsseldorf School of Photography, which has achieved worldwide recognition through Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Ruff, whose master student he became in 2002. His large format images are known for their radical editing that argue a photograph constitutes its own reality. They also refer to pop cultural icons and are supported by their titles.

Kunst & Decker is locally-run gallery in Düsseldorf.

Graduate students visited the exhibition “Breathing Water, Drinking Air” at Philara, a private collection of contemporary art comprising more than 1,800 works in genres such as painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and video.

To demonstrate its wide range and diverse points of interconnection that stem from the exuberance and asymmetrical directions of a passion for collecting, works are juxtaposed in new correlations and with a specific theme. It engages with reflection within and on nature, and the hierarchization of humanity and nature.

In the mid-1900s, Gil Bronner began to build his collection, which, with its strong connection to the Düsseldorf Art Academy, has set itself the task of promoting local emerging artists.

Graduate students visited plan d, an artist-run gallery in Düsseldorf, to see the new show contemporary show “Back from Helsinki”. Participating artists, Katrin Laade and Peter Clouth, gave an exclusive tour of their works and the works of the other talented artists.