Exhibition from September 16, 2024 to February 23, 2025

Opening as part of the Berlin Art Week
Sunday, September 15, 2024, 6:00 pm

Curated by
Johannes Odenthal (Achim Freyer Foundation)
and Karin Scheel (Schloss Biesdorf)

The retrospective ACHIM FREYER BILDER at Schloss Biesdorf presents Achim Freyer's visual art from over 70 years in a large context for the first time.

Achim Freyer was born in Berlin in 1934, was a master student of Bertolt Brecht, lived in the former GDR and became world-famous as a stage and costume designer after fleeing to the West in 1972. However, he is always first and foremost a painter, a visual artist who expands his creative space limitlessly across all available media. It is through his boundlessness that he translates his own experience of the world, the inner processes of perception, into painting, theatre, environments and film, transforming them into a Gesamtkunstwerk.

Having grown up in two dictatorships, his work is characterised by a lifelong urge for freedom and artistic development. The exhibition at Schloss Biesdorf reveals the ruptures and continuities of an impressive artistic biography between East and West.
It shows key works from his creative period in the GDR up to 1972, from the time after his flight from the republic, the great abstract pictorial songs of the 1980s, the heads and dances of death of the 1990s through to a consistent autonomy of colour freed from all representationalism in the last two decades.

The path from existentialist figurative painting to radical abstraction in the GDR led to the legendary first monographic exhibition of his works at the Rossendorf Nuclear Research Centre near Dresden in 1971.
His artistic redefinition in the West after his escape from the republic in 1972 with monochrome gouaches on cardboard and wrapping paper, assemblages and environments are an expression of artistic resistance to any form of definition and restriction. Central rooms of the exhibition are dedicated to these work phases.

Achim Freyer was invited to documenta twice. At documenta 6 (1977), he dealt with the legacy of National Socialism and the division of Germany in the environment "Deutschland - ein Lebensraum". At documenta 8 (1987), Achim Freyer's work "Der gestreckte Blick oder die Krümmung der Fläche zum Raum" ("The stretched gaze or the curvature of the surface into space") showed the connecting lines between visual art and the stage.

Achim Freyer
The painter, theatre maker and collector Achim Freyer was born in Berlin in 1934, studied painting and graphic arts at the Master School for Graphic Arts and Book Crafts in Berlin-Schöneweide from 1951 to 1954, became a master student of Bertolt Brecht in 1955 and fled to the West in 1972 due to artistic reprisals. He became one of the most influential artistic personalities of post-war modernism in Europe with worldwide resonance.He received numerous prizes and awards for his stage work - most recently the German theatre prize "DER FAUST 2022" for his life's work.As a visual artist, he participated in documenta twice and his works were shown in 1981 at the Musee d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in the exhibition "Art Allemagne aujourd'hui".In 1983, the Berliner Festspiele presented Freyer's first retrospective in the Great Orangery of Charlottenburg Palace.Since then he has been represented in numerous national and international exhibitions from Los Angeles to Venice, Vienna, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Moscow and Seoul.Freyer taught as a full professor at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1976 to 1999, founded the Freyer Ensemble in 1988 and the Achim Freyer Foundation with its collection and gallery in 2012.

Further information on Achim Freyer and his work: www.achimfreyer.com

The exhibition is sponsored by the LOTTO-Stiftung Berlin. It is supported by the Municipal Galleries Exhibition Fund and the Exhibition Remuneration Fund of the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.