Bright colors and simple forms: Two characteristics that the Rhenish Expressionists perfected in their expressive paintings of Rhenish history, tradition and landscape. Pictorial composition was everything to them. The arrangement of surfaces and the exaggeration of color worlds were their means of expressing emotional experience. Art fans who want to immerse themselves in this cosmos are in exactly the right place at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. Here you will find the world's largest collection on the subject.
In addition to major works by August Macke, works by Heinrich Campendonk, Hans Thuar, Paul Adolf Seehaus, Carlo Mense and Max Ernst are on display in the museum on Bonn's Museum Mile. The juxtaposition of Macke's Vegetable Field and Thuar's Messdorf is particularly impressive. Two paintings that were created at the same time in 1911 at the same location near Bonn. The artists shared a lifelong friendship, which can still be seen today in the harmony of the exhibits.
Presentation about artists' rooms
But it is not only the Rhenish Expressionists who make their grand entrance in the temple of art, which opened in 1992 right next to the Bundeskunsthalle. German art after 1945 is another focus of the museum, which deliberately stages exhibits in artists' rooms. A maximum of three artists are placed in relation to each other in each area. Visitors are repeatedly drawn into new dialogues characterized by tensions and harmonies. In one room, for example, the colorful Emil Schumacher meets A.R. Penck, a painter who became famous for his black and white symbolic worlds, among other things.
The architecture of the building, designed by Axel Schultes, supports this interaction: strong skylights, unusual corner passages and large open spaces help to approach Baselitz, Beuys, Richter, Polke, Gursky, Mucha, Kiefer and Palermo in completely new contexts of meaning. The graphic collection and collection of photographic and video art are also well worth seeing in the 7500 exhibits.
