LEVY Galerie is delighted to present a selection of works by Werner Berges, Allen Jones, Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray and Cornelia Schleime in its Art Cologne 2020 Viewing Room.
Werner Berges (1941–2017) is commonly attributed to German Pop art, but a rather dominant position in his oeuvre occupy his rather abstract works, influenced by Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism, of which we will show major positions here. The graphic and photo works hold an essential position in the complete artistic work of the British Pop artist Allen Jones (*1983) forming the experimental field as well as compositional base for his and painterly creative work, equally selected for this presentation. Man Ray (1890–1976) is one of the outstanding representatives of dadaism and surrealism and regarded as avant-garde initiator for modern photography and film history by extending the aesthetic of the photographic medium through photograms, solarisation and multiple exposures–captured here in his famous portfolio of women portraits “Femmes”. Likewise, the German-Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) is at the foreground of women Surrealist thinking although she rejected any stylistic affiliation urging to dissolve dichotomies between types, spaces and categories. Her expansion of identity and gender constructs, thematized in our presented works on paper, makes her œuvre so current for contemporary artists. The same urge for freedom can be attributed to Cornelia Schleime (*1953), who was forbidden to exhibit in the GDR and therefore left for West Germany in 1984 throwing away the heavy burden of tradition of the Dresden School and dedicating herself to figural expressions of fluidity, movement and the possibility of constant change in Indian ink on transparent paper as can be explored in our Art Cologne 2020 Viewing Room.