Contact: Margaret Blagg, 325/ 762-2269, director@theoldjailartcenter.org
Digital images available on request.
September 30 - December 31, 2006 - German Expressionism: Works on paper from the Kopriva Collection
The Old Jail Art Center announces the opening of its fall exhibition, German Expressionism: Works on paper from the Kopriva Collection. Houston curator Gus Kopriva and his wife, artist Sharon Kopriva, have been collecting German Expressionist works for some time. Their collection includes pencil-signed etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, watercolors, and drawings by such artists as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Marc Feininger, Franz Marc, George Grosz, Oskar Kokoschka, Käthe Kollwitz, Edvard Munch, and others. These strong images, packed with emotional, psychological, and political messages, are from the first few decades of the 20 th century.
"The Koprivas bring their own aesthetic sensibility to collecting," explained Margaret Blagg, executive director. "They are interested in strong work. The prints and drawings from this highly charged period of artistic production compel dialogue-between viewer and image and among viewers."
One of the movement's most famous adherents, Oskar Kokoschka, wrote of expressionism when eulogizing Edvard Munch, "As in love, two individuals are necessary. Expressionism does not live in an ivory tower, it calls upon a fellow being whom it awakens."
Drawn from the early decades of the 20 th century, this exhibition covers several movements and culminates in a famous exhibition mounted by the Nazis, Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). The artists, from Germany and surrounding countries, reacted to the war years of both World War I and World War II and the political and social upheaval of the years between the wars with urgent visual messages.
heir words accompany their images in the Old Jail galleries. "To understand their anguish requires time on the part of the viewer," added Blagg, "for these works speak as loudly as any written history of this tortured period in the world's history."