Irma Stern. A Modern Artist between Berlin and Cape Town

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 November Group 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 anti-Semitism. 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, 45 euros

Discourse programme Nicht einfach (not easy)

From September, the discourse programme Nicht einfach (not easy)  invites you to broaden your view of the artist Irma Stern and her ambivalent positioning between her exclusion as a Jewish woman and her privilege as a white person of German origin in South Africa. The programme takes a critical and multidirectional look at what the intertwining of colonialism, antisemitism, and anti-Muslim racism means for the German discourse on remembrance.

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

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