Martha Rataj: Leipzig School: The second generation
The lecture presents the second generation of the so-called "Leipzig School", which emerged from the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig and succeeded its founding fathers Werner Tübke, Wolfgang Mattheuer and Bernhard Heisig in the professorships of the flagship academy, and which once again attempted to expand the scope of state-prescribed socialist realism in the tradition of their teachers. On the basis of selected examples, individual positions between old-masterly fine painting and powerful expression, between artistic self-assertion and strategic adaptation and between awakening and disillusionment in the last decades of the GDR will be examined - and a look will also be taken at their reception history in the post-reunification period.
Martha Rataj is an art historian, freelance author and curator. After studying art history and film and television studies at the Ruhr University Bochum and the Università di Pisa, she worked for the international art fair artforum berlin, for various Berlin galleries and art associations and most recently for the Deutscher Künstlerbund. She also worked as a research assistant at the University of Potsdam and lectured at the Berlin University of the Arts, among others. In her seminars, lectures and publications, she focuses in particular on art in the GDR.