Christa Dichgans | Not a Still Life

Piles of plastic toys in children’s rooms, an inflatable swimming pool animal, Batman, paper planes, and mountains of sausages are the subjects of Christa Dichgans’s (b. 1940 in Berlin) paintings. The artist is one of the most important German protagonists of Pop Art and is particularly well known for her early work from the 1960s. At the same time, Dichgans’s work is also rooted in the history of painting, such as the New Objectivity and Surrealism. With the exhibition Not a Still Life at the Kestner Gesellschaft, for the first time her work will now be the subject of a deep examination and a comprehensive institutional presentation. The exhibition will feature some seventy-five paintings created between 1963 and 2013.

The title of the exhibition comes from the well-known quotation "Life is not a still life" by the Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980). This quotation describes the complex relationship between human beings and the world of objects, which Christa Dichgans has also dealt with for over five decades, in which objects from everyday life are often crowded together. These objects are isolated from their everyday context and given new meaning. With obsessive, almost pedantic meticulousness, she paints the flotsam of our lives and distributes this apocalyptic flood evenly across the painting like an ornamental pattern. For instance, the painting New York (1979–80)—a collage of thousands of individual items ranging from dollar bills to the Statue of Liberty, and from skyscrapers to Warhol's Campbell’s soup cans—seems like the psychogram of an overcrowded city, and perhaps also indicates a world that has gotten out of control.

Among other things, Dichgans’s paintings consistently question mass consumption, which has changed over time and led from a materially oriented post-war consumerism to the consumption of the 1980s and 1990s, which was characterized by brand awareness and its symbolic content. Her subjects, which always come from her immediate surroundings, are reminiscent of vanitas still lifes and become symbols of the half-life of an accelerated culture. Yet Dichgans’s compositions are less about abundance than about the surreal distortion and exaggerated emptiness of meaning in volume and accumulation.

The accumulations of children’s toys that Dichgans painted particularly during her two-year grant period in 1966 in New York are filled with emotions and memories and have an almost fetishistic quality. In the following decades, the artist experimented with various styles of painting and explored the boundaries between still lifes and self-portraits. The objects in her still lifes point to possible abysses or the absence of potential owners. Thus, they can also be regarded as portraits.

More recently, her diverse work has received new attention through her participation in various group exhibitions in Germany and abroad. Dichgans’s paintings can be found in numerous museums and collections, including the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, and the Sammlung Goetz in Munich.

Christa Dichgans studied painting at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin from 1960 to 1965. A DAAD grant allowed her to stay in New York in 1966 and 1967. In 1971 she received a fellowship at the Villa Romana in Florence. Dichgans has lived in Berlin and southern France since 1972.

The exhibition is supported by the NORD/LB Kulturstiftung and the friends of the Kestner Gesellschaft.

Curators: Christina Végh and Milan Ther