This year’s collection presentation focuses on Bernard Schultze’s Großes Migof-Labyrinth (Large Migof Labyrinth) from the holdings of the Neue Nationalgalerie. The 1966 work was last exhibited in 1984.

Based on the gestural abstraction of Art Informel, which Schultze translated into a sprawling chromatic space, this environment recalls the bizarre exhibition installations pioneered by the Surrealists, in which strange animals appeared alongside mannequins with their heads encased in birdcages and bulging sacks of coal hung from the ceiling. Schultze’s expansive works set the stage for a world of absurdity; they satirised Pop Art, which was then at the height of its success, and at the same time evoked the horrors of the Vietnam War, which had begun in 1955 and was to drag on for almost a quarter of a century.

Any question about the loss of form also entails how to reclaim it. Such queries resonate in the works of WOLS, in Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut, and in the delicate gossamer webs of paint and colour by Unica Zürn, Richard Oelze and Ursula Schultze-Bluhm.

A special exhibition of the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin