The Rakish BAAL, The Resurrected. A Tribute to Rainer Werner Fassbinder
The exhibition The Rakish BAAL the Resurrected: A Tribute to Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1 Mai to 25 July 2015, Gallery Egbert Baqué Contemporary Art) is inspired above all by Volker Schlöndorff’s 1969 film BAAL, with Fassbinder playing the main part, which Brecht’s heirs banned from being shown publicly for 44 years. ‘What Brecht’s heirs did not see at the time, and nor did we, was how much of Fassbinder was actually in Brecht’s Baal’, wrote Volker Schlöndorff in his autobiography Licht, Schatten und Bewegung. Mein Leben und meine Filme.
Rainer Fetting, the most important protagonist of those artists who in the late 1970s and early 80s received international recognition under the label ‘Neue Wilde’ – painters who expressed fundamental themes such as sexuality and individual mood, but also the cityscape of divided Berlin and its nightlife, today almost mythical, in colour-intensive and sensual paintings – has created a brilliant body of 15 works especially for this exhibition. Young artists like Neal Fox from Britain and Giuseppe Gonella from Italy have engaged in their own and very original way with Fassbinder/Baal, and the Estonian painter Ivar Kaasik unites Rainer Werner Fassbinder with Arthur Rimbaud on a canvas. Volker Schlöndorff, who had found in Fassbinder an ideal actor to play Baal, enriches the exhibition with 17 stills and studio shots from his film, which is now, after decades, finally accessible again.
More Information:
Egbert Baqué Contemporary Art
Fasanenstrasse 37
10719 Berlin
Exhibition duration: 1 Mai to 25 July 2015
Opening times:
Tues to Fri, 2 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Sat, 12 noon – 6 p.m.
Gallerie Egbert Baque Contemporary Art:
Photo left: © Egbert Baqué Contemporary Art
Photo right: Rainer Fetting, Fassbinder Baal, 2015, Ink on canvas, 60 x 40 cm, © Rainer Fetting. Courtesy Egbert Baqué Contemporary Art, Berlin