Fritz Köthe

A Retrospective

Mar 19th – Apr 23rd, 2013

Rosa Fingernägel

Rosa Fingernägel, 1989

Oil on canvas

60 x 50 cm

„The painter Fritz Köthe is a chronicler of pop culture who ruptures and subverts today’s media-based commodity spectacle, using the technique of décollage as a vehicle. Simultaneously, he is a post-modern Surrealist, who in the juxtaposition of incongruous elements sketches a fragmented portrait of our incessantly productive consumer society. In his painted confrontations of fragmentary images from the vibrantly colorful sphere of commerce, “the surprising encounters of various realities in the windows of shops, under electric light, through neon signs, and advertising in general” become palpable, as Uwe M. Schneede has described the effect of the early product placement industry on the pictorial program of the historical Surrealists in the first decades of the 20th century. The “surreality of reality” that has become increasingly more acute in our media age is revealed in Köthe’s work from the 1960’s onward in its extreme fragmentation and inco- herence. (…) Through the medium of painting, Köthe creates the impression of pictorial components that have literally been torn from their original contexts and ripped apart.“ (Belinda Grace Gardner)

Fritz Köthe, born in Berlin in 1916, is one of the major representative of the German Pop-Art. LEVY Galerie shows in its first solo presentation of the artist a grande selection from over 100 works on paper, oil on canvas and graphics from his oeuvre and highlights his artistic evolution since the 1930s.

On the occasion of the exhibition a catalogue is published at Kerber Verlag.