Barbara Camilla Tucholski
Escape - Journey - Desire - January 18 until February 15, 2020

 

We will open the year 2020 in which Galerie Werner Klein celebrates its 20th anniversary with an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Barbara Camilla Tucholski. Her works are characterized by places and journeys and the longing to arrive and stay.

For some, life's journey is interrupted by an escape and marked forever. This is also the case with Barbara Camilla Tucholski. In 1953 her parents fled the GDR with the six-year-old and her little brother. They tell the girl that they are going on an excursion. In fact, they leave their home, the inn, the dog and the blowballs in the garden. Seemingly forever. Thirty years ago, in 1990, not a year after reunification, Tucholski returns to Loitz to the lost parental home, the "castle of her memory". In the following years, Tucholski created installation works in the house and urban space, cycles of drawings and paintings.

"Jana. Orange-Tinfoil Green" from 1991 is a central picture in the series "Kinderbilder" painted in Loitz. It is one focus of the exhibition. The elongated body of the girl in it seems to float in the surrounding colour space. Posture and historical features represent joy, desire and pain in equal measure.

"The basic theme of my work is the paradise of childhood lost for everyone at some point." Barbara Camilla Tucholski

In spring of 2019, Tucholski travelled by car from northern Germany to the centre of Italy and back again via Prague. Like a diary, she has recorded her travels in drawings: the motorways and the landscapes passing by her window, the rest stops and restaurants and the hotels and guesthouses where she has stayed overnight. With a few confident pencil lines she captures the atmosphere of the places that surround her for the moment. The drawings from this journey define the exhibition.

Barbara Camilla Tucholski was born in 1947 in Loitz an der Peene. She lives and works in Oevelgönne, Vienna and Rome. Tucholski's works are part of important private and public collections such as the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Munich, the Albertina, Vienna and the Casa di Goethe in Rome.