Bernhard Heisig: Maler und Lehrer
In the organizer's words:
2025 marks the centenary of the birth of the painter Bernhard Heisig (1925 - 2011). His paintings bring together the themes of his century. Born in what is now Wroclaw (Poland), the artist was involved in the Second World War in German Wehrmacht uniform. While the GDR, in which he lived, largely dismissed any guilt, Heisig sought to find his personal part in it. For many West German colleagues of his age, the turn to abstraction was a consequence of the ideological appropriation of art during the Third Reich. Not so with Heisig. He took a different path. His own involvement in the history of the 20th century weighed heavily on his canvases. Throughout his life, he dealt with guilt and responsibility and found the topos of the "duty perpetrator" in his paintings. But his work did not end there. The search for what holds the world together at its core repeatedly led him to the Faust subject matter and the theme of the boundless pursuit of knowledge to the point of self-destruction.
Among the many ways of accessing the work of the artist Bernhard Heisig, the exhibition turns to his Faust works. In oil paintings, pen and ink drawings and lithographs, the artist strove to create an image of Faust, which he related to his own, not always uncompromising, life experiences with the failure of the socialist utopia. It is indisputable that he remained a restless seeker of truth - in the spirit of Goethe's Faust. It is not without reason that the Faust figure in some of his works bears the artist's features.
The exhibition "Bernhard Heisig - Painter and Teacher" at the MÄDLER ART FORUM in Leipzig turns its attention to the Faust theme in the artist's work on the centenary of his birth and, for conservation reasons, is showing eleven pen and ink drawings on loan from the Freies Deutsches Hochstift Frankfurt, which were created in 2001 for an illustrated edition of "Faust" published by Faber und Faber.
This focus on Heisig's work corresponds with the 500th anniversary of the traditional restaurant "Auerbachs Keller Leipzig" as a neighbor of the MÄDLER ART FORUM. "Auerbachs Keller" owes its worldwide fame not least to the scene of the same name in Johann Wolfgang Goethe's "Faust". - By concentrating on Heisig's work on Faust, the exhibition points the way to a group of works that is rarely shown separately. The "Faust" illustrations reflect Heisig's universal understanding of the world and lead directly to the center of his artistic intentions.
The exhibition also aims to trace the path to the teacher Bernhard Heisig, who was twice rector of the famous Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, from which the internationally renowned Leipzig School emerged after reunification in the 1990s. Artists from two generations were master students of Heisig, including the painter Neo Rauch, one of the most famous. The exhibition "Bernhard Heisig - Painter and Teacher" pays tribute not only to the artist Heisig but also to the university teacher and presents four of his master students with a small selection of their work: ANTOINETTE, Christl Maria Göthner, Sighard Gille and Lutz Friedel. - In the course of the exhibition, discussions with the exhibiting artists will attempt to reflect on Heisig's formative influence on their work in the interplay of attraction and repulsion.
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