Exhibitions

COLOR IN FOCUS. WORKS FROM THE PAUL EGE ART COLLECTION

Opening: Sunday, April 6, 2025, 11 a.m.

April 6 – August 17, 2025 
 

From spring 2025, PEAC Museum will be presenting the exhibition Color in Focus. Works from the Paul Ege Art Collection. The show highlights the fascinating role color has played in art from the 1970s to the present day. Color in Focus comprises around fifty works from the Paul Ege Art Collection, supplemented by new commissions from artists in the collection. 

The point of departure for the selection are the works of painter and graphic artist Frank Badur (b. 1944 in Oranienburg, lives and works in Berlin and Finland). In keeping with our practice of thematically exploring the collection through the lens of a single artist, the exhibition seeks to establish a dialogue between art historical forerunners and contemporary artists. 

Frank Badur’s oeuvre—analytical rigor and artistic intuition 

Badur’s work bears a strong relationship to Concrete Art and unfolds in the dynamic relationship between strictly constructed surfaces and color as a central design elements. In his compositions, color becomes space, creating simultaneous contrasts and making the instability of color perception tangible.

Color and form—perception and immersion 

The exhibition oscillates between two poles: an analytical approach and an artistic intuitive use of color. The spectrum ranges from Josef Albers, who systematically explored the perception of color, to Marcia Hafif, who meticulously researched the fundamentals of color painting, to Joseph Marioni and Rudolf de Crignis, who make color itself the subject of their seemingly monochrome works, and on to the opulent color frenzy in the works of Andrea Ostermeyer. 

Across the exhibition spaces, a variety of thematic areas emerge that deal with both the materiality of color and the perception of the viewer, as well as the relationship between color and form.  

Artists in the exhibition include: Josef Albers, Kirstin Arndt, Corey d’Augustine, Frank Badur, Rudolf de Crignis, Rupprecht Geiger, Marcia Hafif, Martina Klein, Imi Knoebel, Axel Lieber, Richard Long,  Joseph Marioni, Cristina Ohlmer,  Andrea Ostermeyer, Andreas von Ow, Winston Roeth, herman de vries. 

SOUND BODY SPACE

Friday, November 17 to Sunday, December 17, 2023

A museum without objects—a space for experiencing art beyond the visual. For one month from 17 November 2023, PEAC Museum will present two artistic projects focusing on sound and the body as part of the experimental programme SOUND BODY SPACE. French sound artist Dominique Petitgand will create an expansive work whose fragmented, abstract sounds will spread throughout the entire museum. Theater Freiburg’s School of Life and Dance is developing a piece that invites visitors to explore the space with their own bodies. SOUND BODY SPACE thus opens up new perspectives on the relationship between space, artwork and audience, which is characteristic of the works in the Paul Ege Art Collection. Both projects are being developed independently of each other and will be presented alternately.

Sound and the body within the empty museum galleries

The two SOUND BODY SPACE projects dispense entirely with material exhibits, concentrating instead on the ephemeral art forms of sound and dance. The focus is on the encounter with the museum space and the visitors’ experiences. On the one hand, SOUND BODY SPACE takes up PEAC Museum’s collection focus on Minimal Art, which questions the relationship between viewer, work, and surrounding space: rather than being mounted on canvas or raised on a plinth, the sculptural works relate to the entire surrounding space, reveal their materiality without illusionism, and introduce time as a dimension of perception. On the other hand, SOUND BODY SPACE also provides an opportunity to question the supposed neutrality of space, to trace modes of action, and to develop a personal relationship to the exhibition space. Both the sound installation by Dominique Petitgand and the performative tour by the School of Life and Dance evolve over time, affected by the movement of visitors in the space. Through their use of the materials “body” and “sound”, the two independent, site-specific works that emerge render the visitors an active part of the art.

School of Life and Dance—„Wallungen“
The School of Life and Dance is an open dance collective at Theater Freiburg under the direction of choreographers Graham Smith and Maria Pires. In intergenerational ensembles, they explore body awareness through contemporary dance forms. „Wallungen“ (German for “flushes”), developed by Lisa Klingelhöfer, Caroline Knapp, Anne Schiffers and Graham Smith, is a performative tour through PEAC Museum’s exhibition spaces. Tracking traces and lines of sight, the dancers focus on the transformation of perception through time and space.

The performances will take place on Saturday, 25 November, 2023 and Saturday, 2 December, 2023 from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Dominique Petitgand—„Le poumon et les nerfs“
Dominique Petitgand works with an inventory of recorded voices, silences, noises, and music, which he weaves into soundscapes by means of montage and editing. His sound works construct and deconstruct memories and associations in equal measure, and thus occupy a space between reality and fiction. The work “Le poumon et les nerfs” (Engl. “Lung and Nerves”), produced especially for PEAC Museum, focuses on physical experience—both of the artist in the working process as well as of the visitors while listening—transforming the soundscape itself into a living organism.

The sound installation will be open Tuesday through Friday and on Sunday during regular opening hours from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

SCHULKUNST EXHIBITION "SERIES"

October 11 - November 05, 2023

From October 11 to November 05, PEAC Museum will host this year's SCHULKUNST exhibition on "Series". The format is part of the SCHULKUNST support program of the Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs of Baden-Württemberg, which has been an integral part of cultural education in schools for over 30 years.
In this program, students deal creatively with changing themes in the visual arts. The program is aimed at all school types and ages.
Convinced of the importance of the format for the quality and openness of school art education, the PEAC Museum is hosting the SCHULKUNST exhibition in Freiburg for the second time after 2019.
In dialogue with the students' works, the exhibition will also feature works from Paul Ege Art Collection. These are also characterized by their focus on a pictorial development out of serial actions and settings. The artistic gestures, the materials used report on an attitude that specifically uses serial work and experimentation to arrive at ever new pictorial results and perceptual experiences, and once again expand our view of the theme of the series.
With works by numerous students from schools in Freiburg, the districts of Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald and Emmendingen as well as from the Paul Ege Art Collection by Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, On Kawara, Phil Sims, Peter Dreher and many more.

Vom Geschmack eines Apfels (On the Taste of an Apple). Works from the collection with guests
April 24 to September 17, 2023

Press images and credits: https://my.hidrive.com/share/r...

From Sunday, 23 April 2023, PEAC Museum Freiburg will be presenting the new exhibition „Vom Geschmack eines Apfels – Eine Sammlungspräsentation mit Gästen“ (On the Taste of an Apple—An exhibition of works from the collection with guests). This exhibition takes the most recent works by American artist Joseph Marioni as its starting point, which are being presented in Europe for the first time on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The physical palpability of color and light in his large-format paintings evoke an intimate and sensual relationship between the work and the viewer. “Vom Geschmack eines Apfels” relates his paintings to works from the Paul Ege Art Collection that expand classical conceptions of the image: How can space, body and the artwork be understood as parts of a holistic sensory experience—through the artistic media of video, sculpture and painting over a temporal horizon from the 1960s to the present day?

Radical Painting and Joseph Marioni
Radical Painting is one of the Paul Ege Art Collection’s central themes. The monochrome, abstract movement emerged in the 1970s through a process of intensive, transatlantic exchange and explores the basic conditions of painting. At the core of the quiet, meditative works lies a self-referential inquiry into their elemental components of material, color, support, format, and tool. Joseph Marioni’s works are born out of these considerations. They first capture the viewer’s attention as physical objects that refer to nothing other than their own materiality. The subtly tapered canvases serve as supports for a variety of vertically oriented paint applications, which flow into sculptural paint drips at the open edges of the paintings. Yet the works do not remain self-contained objects, but rather open up to the viewer: The fluctuating degree of transparency of the paint layers creates a pictorial depth that manifests itself as dematerialized light, radiating a powerful allure. Through this relationship, the artwork morphs from a passive object into an active subject, a presence vis-à-vis the viewer.
Joseph Marioni was born in Cincinnati, OH (USA) in 1943 and lives and works in New York, NY (USA). He has participated in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, including: KOLUMBA Museum Cologne 2021, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg 2019, Museum Wiesbaden 2018, Kunstmuseum Bern (CH) 2017, Philadelphia Museum of Art/Philadelphia (USA) 2015, The Phillips Collection/Washington D.C. (USA) 2011, Museum Fine Arts Budapest (HU) 2010. His works are represented in private and public collections such as Whitney Museum of American Art, Basel Kunstmuseum, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, La Collection Jumex, Malmö Kunsthal, Abteiberg Museum and others.

The exhibition
“Vom Geschmack eines Apfels” juxtaposes Marioni’s works with works that have emerged out of the increasing detachment from classical conceptions of the image within the timeframe of the museum’s collection history. How does the relationship between work, space, and viewer shift in the sculptural works of American minimalist artist Carl Andre or in Dieter Kiessling’s interactive video installation? The common thread running through all the works in the exhibition is that they open themselves up to the viewer, whose physicality they challenge as the basis of an aesthetic experience. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a text by the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges: “The taste of the apple [...] lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way [...] poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.” This creates a continuous interplay between reason and feeling, materiality and representation, conscious and unconscious, in which one’s own self is reflected.
Featuring works by Carl Andre, Michał Budny, Alan Charlton, Günther Holder, Dieter Kiessling, Richard Long, Joseph Marioni, Andrea Ostermeyer, Nikola Ukić, Elisabeth Vary and Michel Verjux.

Allerbeste Aussichten. Neue Generation Kunst

27.11.2022 – 26.03.2023

The exhibition “Allerbeste Aussichten. Neue Generation Kunst” (Best Possible Prospects. A New Generation of Art) resumes an exhibition format started in 2016 in collaboration with three renowned German art academies. It specifically focuses on the youngest generation of visual artists: the participating artists are still in education or have recently completed it. They are thus in the midst of the exciting development process of their individual artistic visual language.
What they have in common is a questioning of processes and current conditions of creating images, as well as their reception and perception by the viewer. At a moment in which digital images are omnipresent—as well as their creation, reproduction, and reception—the question of what kind of artworks are currently being created in which educational structures is more crucial than ever, as are the issues young artists are dealing with today.
The exhibition brings together works from a wide variety of genres and media, many of which have been produced especially for the exhibition. They are characterized by a general openness to the conception both of genre and the image. On view are photographs, paintings, performative, installation, and mixed-media works, video and paper works, drawings, sculptures, as well as digitally generated images.
The direct connection to the Paul Ege Art Collection and the PEAC Museum is established not only through a general questioning of the art image itself; the students are also guided and informed by professors whose works form part of the collection.

The participating artists are:
students of Fine Arts at the Caspar David Friedrich Institute of the University of Greifswald: Charleen Dahms, Anne Martin, Johanna Herrmann, Ulrich Schneider, Rabea Dransfeld, Sten Niklas Washausen, Jakob Stolte, Paula Finsterbusch—supervised by Prof. Christian Frosch, Professor of Painting, Drawing, Space and Interdisciplinary Artistic Strategies, and Cindy Schmiedichen, Artistic researcher in the faculty;
students of the Painting and Graphic Arts Class at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich: Khashayar Zandyavari, Paula Niño, Cheng Hsin Chiang, Lukas Niedermeier, Ikue Ohta, Johannes Kiel, Tabata von der Locht, Jimmy Vuong, Hannah Jeong, Caroline Kretschmer – supervised by Prof. Schirin Kretschmann;
students of the Conceptual Painting class at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar in Saarbrücken: Laura Sperl, Suyoung Kim, Hwakyeong Kim, Jaeyun Moon, Ham Babaei, Meret Sophie Preiß, Johanna Disch, Leonie Mertes, supervised by Prof. Katharina Hinsberg;
as well as the professors and lecturers mentioned above.

Backspace. Sebastian Dannenberg
17.07.2022 – 30.10.2022

feat. Josef Albers, Kirstin Arndt, Stephan Baumkötter, Dan Flavin, Marcia Hafif, Donald Judd, Martina Klein, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Karin Sander and Antonio Scaccabarozzi.

The exhibition Backspace presents works by the artist Sebastian Dannenberg in dialogue with works from the Paul Ege Art Collection. Works by prominent representatives of minimal art and monochrome painting are juxtaposed with a fresh, evolving body of work.
Sebastian Dannenberg is, in his own words, a committed painter, even if his works are as object-like as they are painterly. What we see in or through them is reminiscent of the backs of paintings, veneers, empty frames and contours, the provisional, the unfinished, and the mobile. Aluminum, metal, steel, wood, concrete, and glass all recur as materials. The space—both as a site of seeing and as a size conceived in terms of content—also repeatedly serves as an antagonist, for the color, as well as the painterly gesture. These are paintings that question origin, condition, and finally perception—especially in the here and now, at a time when we still assume that visual art, whether painting, video, sculpture, or performance, obviously shows the unambiguous, that the world must be seen, that the painted image must correspond to a certain form and materiality.
In deliberately subverting this expectation of an image—by supposedly withdrawing it from immediate view, Sebastian Danneberg instead negotiates its visual reality in order to enable us to perceive and discover it consciously and ever anew.

Sebastian Dannenberg, born 1980 in Bottrop, lives and works near Bremen.

Peter Tollens. Something to live for
20.03. – 26.06.2022

Im Mittelpunkt des malerischen Interesses von Peter Tollens stehen grundsätzlich zwei Aspekte von Farbe: In seinen Werken wird sie sowohl als Materie als auch als Sinneseindruck sichtbar, so dass in der in diesem Sinne ungegenständlichen Malerei Farbe zugleich Ausdrucksmittel als auch deren Motiv ist. Trotzdem dient das Bild dabei nie einem Selbstzweck, sondern wird zum Ereignis und stellt dabei immer wieder aufs Neue die Frage, was dort wie sichtbar wird. Die Schau im PEAC Museum wird aus den umfangreichen Beständen der Paul Ege Art Collection nicht nur eine umfassende Auswahl an Gemälden der letzten 25 Jahre zeigen, sondern anhand einer Vielzahl von Aquarellen, Zeichnungen sowie Künstlerbüchern führt sie grundlegend in das vielschichtige Werk von Peter Tollens ein.