On hiking: The pictures of Johannes Molzahn are a discovery

He looks seriously, a little searching and with a determined mouth area. Around 1911, Johannes Molzahn paints with a hat and tie. The style and the cool blue of the sky as well as the costume of his veneration of the late Impressionist Ferdinand Hodler tell before a strip of bunch clouds; But also from the artistic talent of the almost twenty -year -old.

Molzahn, born and raised in Duisburg in 1892 in 1892, has been hiking in Switzerland in 1892. He is opposed as a trained graphic artist and photographer, joins the circle around Otto Meyer-Amden, where he closes friendship with Willi Baumeister, Johannes Itten or Oskar Schlemmer.

The self-portrait (price on request) is the start of time for the exhibition in the Berinson Gallery, which otherwise gives an almost retrospective overview of the work of the painter that alternates between abstraction and figuration, which cannot be called in terms of stylistically.

Inspired by futurism

At the beginning of the First World War, the autodidact returns to Weimar, receives his first studio, but will soon be drafted into a soldier. In the war year 1917, the Berlin avant-garde broker, Herwarth Walden, exhibited him for the first time in his gallery “Der Sturm”.

Molzahn initially spends the post -war period in Weimar, where he maintains close relationships with the Bauhaus, joining artists’ associations such as the “Work Council for Art” and the “November Group”. Early paintings from this phase inspired by Futurism cannot be seen in the exhibition, but excellent pressure graphics from this progress and technology testify to the complete period, including the complete “time button” folder, six etchings that were laid by Alfred Flechtheim in 1921.

Clouds and wings

Images such as “cosmic composition” or “overturn” transform components and set pieces from the world of mechanics and technology into an abstract form vocabulary. In parallel to his appointment to the art of arts and crafts in Magdeburg, Molzahn works as a commercial engineer in the 1920s, increasingly flow in typographic elements into his painting.

“Armariolo in Antisma” from 1931 offers an impressive example, whose protagonists are characters and the composition of the folds between the saying band and Leporello is reminiscent of an ark in deep waters. The title -giving words that revolve around the polarity of the mind and heart comes from the medieval nun and mystic Hadewych Blommaert.

The square oil picture in the steamed blue, turquoise and earth tones- through which abstracted clouds and wings pull, takes a mask and a hand with an extended index finger- such as a meditation over the cryptic pair of terms, which has used molitated tooth in a total of 13 pictures.

Even in “The Tower of Men”, such an indirectly religious reference cannot be ruled out. Eight figures in an unstable balance form for athletic circus performance. The almost identical duplicates rearrange in front of a mechanistic landscape. Only a shape with white hatched cloak and green, mask -like face scale. In emphasised diagonals, she seems to fall out of the tower or to climb sky.

A light, fresh breeze

The large portrait format dates from 1933 and could also be a premonition of the dark mass movements and time -runs that trigger the National Socialists’ takeover. As a prominent representative of the avant -garde, Molzahn is released from the civil service at the art academy in Breslau, his works are confiscated and defamed in the exhibition “degenerate art” in 1937. The following year, the artist emigrated to the USA and only returned to Germany in 1959.

The profound change of the new living environment is artistically shown by the fantastic work “Spatial Straa” (spatial layers) and “The Fable of the Contortionist II” (the fable from the snake man) from the 1940s. The colors are brightened, pastel pink, violet or blue shape a light and fresh mood. The bold perspectives seem to reflect on the endless vastness of North America and the urban polyphony of its cities.

It may be that it is due to the various changes in style that the dairy, who died in 1965, belongs to the more forgotten modernity today. Galerist Hendrik Berinson succeeds in an exciting rediscovery.