Contemporary Photography and the Old Masters

How does contemporary photography change our view of Old Master painting? The Gemäldegalerie addresses this question in its exhibition "To See Art" and shows how vibrant and productive the dialogue between the two media remains to this day. Seeing old masters with new eyes The special exhibition brings together around 90 international photographic positions with selected masterpieces from the Gemäldegalerie, one of the most important collections of pre-modern painting worldwide. Works by artists such as Thomas Struth, Cindy Sherman, Martin Parr, Jeff Wall, Candida Höfer and Carrie Mae Weems encounter the Old Masters as homage, reinterpretation or reflection and open up surprising perspectives on well-known works. In six thematic chapters, the exhibition illuminates different forms of engagement with historical images and their interpretation by contemporary artists. The focus is on questions of appropriation, staging and transformation, as well as materiality, perception and digital image circulation. Appropriate, reflect, retell For many of the represented photographers, the works of the Old Masters are far more than just art-historical heritage. They serve as an inspiration for new artistic creations, comments on social issues, and formal-aesthetic experiments. Jeff Wall transforms the contemplative silence of a painting by Chardin into a contemporary artist portrait. Cindy Sherman, Catherine Opie and Maud Sulter draw on historical portrait traditions to address questions of gender, identity and cultural belonging. Tom Hunter relocates image compositions from pre-modern painting to Berlin-Friedrichshain and makes the consequences of gentrification visible. Other artists focus their attention on the material nature of the works: Ola Kolehmainen, for example, enlarges the craquelé of a female portrait by Petrus Christus to monumental proportions, thus making the traces of time and aging into an image motif. Another focus is on the museum as a place itself. Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth show museums as spaces of contemplation and staging, while Louise Lawler questions the mechanisms of institutional meaning-making. Carrie Mae Weems, on the other hand, addresses the question of access, representation and exclusion in her series "Museums" and makes visible whose perspectives and stories are present in the museum and which are marginalized. Bettina von Zwehl and Miguel Calderón, in turn, direct attention to those people who work daily among the masterpieces and yet remain mostly invisible. The Museum in the Digital Age At the same time, the exhibition addresses the changing conditions of seeing in the digital age. Visitors become part of the museum staging with their smartphones, while social media help determine which artworks gain visibility. Collections of pre-modern painting are today not only sites of art history but also image spaces of the present. "Die Kunst zu sehen" unites loans from important international museums, galleries and private collections. Educational Programme A comprehensive educational programme for all age groups invites visitors to rediscover their own perspective on the Old Masters. Exhibition Catalogue An extensively illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition. Curating Team The exhibition is curated by Katja Kleinert, curator of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting, and Erik Eising, research associate at the Gemäldegalerie.