Archive

Irma Stern. A Modern Artist between Berlin and Cape Town

13. July to 
2. November 2025
Portrait of a Black woman, sitting on a wooden chair, her arms crossed in front of her chest

Irma Stern, Maid in Uniform, 1955, oil on canvas, Irma Stern Trust Collection, Cape Town © Irma Stern Trust / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025, photo: Courtesy of the Trustees of the Irma Stern Collection, Cape Town

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Portrait of a young Black man in a wide-open blue shirt and red headscarf, standing in front of a large floral arrangement

Irma Stern, Zanzibar Boy, 1945, oil on canvas, Rupert Art Foundation, Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch © Irma Stern Trust / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025, photo: Courtesy of Rupert Art Foundation, Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch

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Portrait of a little girl in a colorful dress with a white collar, sitting on a chair and holding flowers in her hand

Irma Stern, The Eternal Child, 1916, Rupert Art Foundation, Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch © Irma Stern Trust / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025, Photo: Rupert Art Foundation

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Irma Stern, Young Malay Maiden with Black Hair, 1938, Öl auf Leinwand, Lloyd Trust House © Irma Stern Trust / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025 Foto: Graham's Fine Art, Johannesburg

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Irma Stern, Umgababa, 1922, Öl auf Leinwand, Irma Stern Trust Collection, Kapstadt © Irma Stern Trust / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025

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The expressionist Irma Stern (1894–1966) is considered one of the most important representatives of modern art in South Africa. In Germany, however, her art is hardly known. This was once different: growing up between the two countries, she studied painting in Weimar and Berlin. In the 1920s, the capital’s most important galleries exhibited her expressive portraits and colorful landscapes. She was a founding member of the Novembergruppe and a close friend of the Brücke artist Max Pechstein.With the rise of the Nazis, Stern’s career in Germany came to an abrupt end: as a Jew, she was persecuted and her expressionist works were denounced as “degenerate.”

 

Stern’s work is complex and marked by an indissoluble historical ambivalence: as a woman, she had to assert herself in a male-dominated art world. As a Jew, she experienced exclusion and antisemitism. At the same time, as a white artist, she benefited from the racist social structures of colonialism and the apartheid system and presented herself as an “expert” on Black cultures. The Brücke-Museum is dedicating the first solo museum exhibition in her former home city of Berlin to this important artist of global modernism.

 

Over 40 paintings, drawings, and watercolors from international collections, primarily South African, enter into dialogue with works by the Brücke artists and invite visitors to (re)discover Irma Stern. A site-specific intervention by South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga reflects on Stern’s life and work from a queer Black perspective.

 

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Irma Stern, edited by Lisa Hörstmann and Lisa Marei Schmidt for the Brücke-Museum, with contributions by Irene Below, LaNitra M. Berger, Lisa Hörstmann, Gcotyelwa Mashiqa, Athi-Patra Ruga and Lisa Marei Schmidt, Hirmer Verlag, 208 pages, museum edition 39 euros

 

Nicht Einfach (Not Easy)

 

From September 2025, the pluralistic discourse programme Nicht Einfach (Not Easy) invites you to broaden your view of the artist Irma Stern and her ambivalent experiences between persecution and exile as a Jewish woman and privileges as a white South African. Taking Stern’s life and work as a starting point, the complexity of the entanglements of anti-Semitism, colonialism and racism in the current German discourse on remembrance will be addressed.

 

A themed table, which constantly changes over the course of the exhibition, invites visitors to participate in the project. The programme of workshops, tours and discussions will begin in September.

 

The content of the pluralistic discourse programme will be developed by the team of experts Ahmad Dakhnous, Tahir Della, Anna Yeboah and Yehudit Yinhar. They are scientifically supported by Pegah Byroum-Wand. Nicht Einfach (Not Easy) is an idea of Daniela Bystron, curator for Outreach, Brücke-Museum.

 

Supported by the Project Fund for Contemporary History and Culture of Remembrance of the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt.

 

Artists

Programme

Publications

Irma Stern

Catalogue
Edited by: Lisa Hörstmann and Lisa Marei Schmidt for Brücke-Museum
Texts:  Valentina Bay, Irene Below, LaNitra M. Berger, Lisa Hörstmann, Gcotyelwa Mashiqa, Athi-Patra Ruga and Lisa Marei Schmidt

Hirmer Verlag
208 pages
German / English
ISBN: 978-3-7774-4529-8
45 €
Pulished April 2025

2020-2025
Irma Stern

Staff

Lisa Marei Schmidt, Curator

Lisa Hörstmann, Co-Curator

Valentina Bay, Assistant Curator and Project Management

Daniela Bystron, Curator of Outreach

Ximena Gutiérrez Toro, Curatorial Assistant of Outreach

Stoodio Santiago da Silva, Exhibition Design

Dr. Pegah Byroum-Wand, Coordination, moderation, and scientific mentoring Nicht einfach (not easy)