Bruno GollerRetrospektive 1922–1992

For a long time the history of twentieth-century painting was interpreted as a struggle for supremacy between schools and styles, and in the process it was overlooked how decisive precisely the outsiders can be for the development of art. Bruno Goller, too, belongs to this group of idiosyncratic loners – despite the various parallels his work reveals with the art of Surrealism and with New Objectivity. Born in Gummersbach in 1901 and permanently resident in Düsseldorf from 1927, over more than seventy years of work he unfolded a magical pictorial world which, in contrast to the great current of the age, abstraction, is marked by a clear commitment to the representational. We recognise houses, clocks, hats, roses, umbrellas, coats and, not least, women, who as a rule are rendered in typified and strictly formalised fashion. Even if men occasionally appear in his paintings, it is the women who stand at the centre of his art. In their idol-like presence, however, they are as little tangible or open to interpretation as all the objects that surround them. What deeper meaning brings all these things in the picture together? Associative links within the pictorial inventory are certainly possible here and there, yet Goller’s paintings resist any unambiguous legibility. In the end they refuse the grasp of their interpreters, and it is precisely from this that they draw their radiance: the magic of the enigmatic.

Exhibition:
Kunstmuseum Bonn, 19/9/2024 – 19/1/2025