1963 | NEO-EXPRESSIONISM or NEW FAUVES. Art returns to painting.

curated by Francesca Franco

The term neo-expressionism describes a cultural movement that invades Germany and then the United States starting in the late 1960s and marking a widespread return to painting – a painting that, as its name suggests, is characterised by the re-appearance of the features typical of German historical expressionism formulated in the early 1910s and 1920s by the artists of Die Brücke [The Bridge], Der Blaue Reiter [The Blue Knight] and the November Gruppe, whose interest was to raise the freeing forces of nature and instinct against middle-class philistinism and pan-germanism of Wilhelm’s time.
The freedom of expression offered by the tradition of early German Expressionism constitutes a return to the origins of figuration, although with a strong awareness of contemporariness and of the lessons of abstract expressionism, assemblage and informal art. Reversing the linear pathway of 1960s and 1970s art towards a dematerialisation of the work, an impersonal execution and compliance with modern science, it reintroduces the traditional practices of painting and sculpture – and with them, it restores the narrative nature of images – images which are now once again mixed with the matter of colour, which are no longer transient like those of video, but do impose certain observation times.
In Germany in particular, where artists like Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Frank Helmut Auerbach, AR Penck, Markus Lüpertz are involved, the re-interpretation of expressionism becomes a tool to investigate the dark side of the recent nationalistic past thanks to the support of gallery managers Michael Werner and Benjamin Katz, who are active first in Berlin (1963) and then in Cologne (1968). In 1977, instead, the artists Bernd Zimmer, Helmut Middendorf, Rainer Fetting Salomé, Anne Jud and Berthold Schepers found in Berlin the Galerie am Moritzplatz, which gives origin to the group of the Neuen Wilde [New Fauves] with the goal of recovering a passionate, naïve painting wishing to act as an intentional challenge to the rationalism of Western thought, making eroticism the key to come again into contact with the natural reality of man.
Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s a similar attitude establishes itself in New York with Julian Schnabel and David Salle, in Italy with Transavantgarde, in France with Jean Michel Alberola and Gérard Garouste, and receives its international recognition in the exhibitions New Spirit in Painting at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (1981) and Zeitgeist, curated by Christos M. Joachimedes and Norman Rosenthal at Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau (1982).