STUDIO

In Dialogue: Hasso Plattner Collection: Art from the GDR

William Cook

IN A TRENDY ART GALLERY IN POTSDAM, ON THE GREEN edge of Berlin [1], a gaggle of German journalists have gathered for the opening of an extraordinary exhibition. At first glance, In Dialogue looks like a refreshingly conventional display of figurative painting: portraits, landscapes, cityscapes … Yet when you look a little closer, you realise there’s something odd about it — something strangely disconcerting, like the vague memory of a bad dream. And then you read the captions, and you realise what’s amiss: these pictures were all painted under the watchful eye of one of the most repressive dictatorships of the Soviet era, the German Democratic Republic [2]. In 1990, after the GDR was absorbed into the West German Bundesrepublik, East German art was left in an awkward limbo. From…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, March 2025

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