The Beauty of Things. Still Lifes from 1900 to the Present
With a loan from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection
The Mercedes-Benz Art Collection is supporting the exhibition ‘The Beauty of Things. Still Lifes from 1900 to the Present’ with a loan from its collection.
About the exhibition: Between beauty and transience, between splendour and traces of profane everyday life – still lifes have found their way into art history as an independent pictorial genre since the Baroque period at the latest and are now one of the classic academic pictorial tasks alongside portrait, landscape, genre and history painting. (…) In the 20th century, the subject was broken up and further developed by artistic innovations such as the objet trouvé. Still lifes are now no longer merely illusionistic depictions on canvas, but are brought into the room with objects as reliefs or installations. Based on the museum’s own holdings, the exhibition spans the period from 1900 to the present day and repeatedly emphasises the reference to the reality of our lives and our surroundings. After all, the still life functions as a mirror of bourgeois reality like no other pictorial genre. (Kunsthalle Emden)