After the great survey of painting in the exhibition Jetzt! Young Painting in Germany, the Kunstmuseum Bonn is now turning its attention once again to its own collection, which is being presented in a new way in its many and varied aspects, incorporating acquisitions and donations from recent years as well as permanent loans from private collections (KiCo, Mondstudio, Scharpff-Striebich, etc.).

At the same time, the re-hanging also provides a resonance space for the positions previously shown in Jetzt!, since the Kunstmuseum has defined painting as the focal point of its collection of contemporary art from the very beginning. Thus, a room with paintings from the 1980s provides a retrospective of the emphatic revitalization of painting and at the same time an outlook on current painting projects, for example Tobias Pils and his complex paintings, both reflective and intuitively developed. The spectrum ranges from Informel to Palermo, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and to Pia Fries, Christopher Wool and Thomas Huber.

Also the pictorial possibilities of photography are discussed, with new acquisitions of photographs by Heidi Specker and Viktoria Binschtok, which were previously shown in solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum, and photographs by Claudia Fährenkemper and Hartmut Neumann, who donated a comprehensive body of his work to the museum. The museum also received works by Harald Naegeli, who is not presented here as a sprayer, but with his Urwolken as a creator of utopian drawing spaces.

The video centre is showing the film Unheil (disaster) by John Bock, acquired in 2018, which invents a medieval age full of disturbing rituals. Separate rooms are dedicated to Isa Genzken and Georg Herold, two artists who refuse to be tied down by any kind of media or content, Genzken confidently improvising, Herold with irreverent humour “Nur nichts anbrennen lassen” (“Just don’t scorch anything”).

With works by:
Hans-Peter Adamski, Jan Albers, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Viktoria Binschtok, John Bock, Katinka Bock, Shannon Bool, Herbert Brandl, Walter Dahn, Hanne Darboven, Claudia Fährenkemper, Pia Fries, Isa Genzken, Michael Görnert, Katharina Grosse, Geord Herold, Charline von Heyl, Stephan Huber, Thomas Huber, Jörg Immendorff, Christof Kohlhöfer, Milan Kunc, Wolfgang Laib, Michel Majerus, Ingo Meller, Johanna von Monkiewitsch, Harald Naegeli, Hartmut Neumann, Marcel Odenbach, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Blinky Parlemo, Tobis Pils, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Sebastian Riemer, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Thomas Scheibitz, Heidi Specker, Gerd & Uwe Tobias, Günter Umberg, Stefan Vogel, Christopher Wool