CLOSE UP
Diving Deeper into Contemporary Art

How do artists process political events from the immediate present? The current CLOSE UP focuses on three works by Bettina Semmer, Armin Boehm and Dierk Schmidt from the Städel Museum’s Collection of Contemporary Art. They are representative of the artistic treatment of current events in the field of painting – contemporary history painting, so to speak. Despite their different approaches, the artists have one thing in common in regard to their approach: They change and expand the historical model with the means of painting. They confront the viewer, make the invisible visible, and point out various perspectives. The boundaries between objective reproduction and subjective influence or statement are fluid. Their painting leaves the realm of documentation and develops its own narrative. With the means of art, they – directly or indirectly – actively call upon us to take a stand ourselves.

Honoured with the DigAMus Award 2023.

The relationship between photography and painting forms the subject of the first presentation: By taking Sigmar Polke, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Jörg Sasse as examples, we examine in detail the fertile cross-pollination between these two supposedly competing media. The three works in the room can be viewed under different ‘lenses’, bringing to light hidden threads between art and society, in the past and present.