Your Wounds

Passion imaginations in Christian
image traditions and
image conceptions in Modern Art

April 26 – August 24, 2014

With the depiction of Jesus’ tale of woe the wound, physical pain and injuries have become worthy subjects of occidental art. The most interesting pictures of the Passion of Jesus are intended to envision the depicted with the highest intensity. This intention raises a complex pictorial language in order to emphasize the pictorial expression and to involve the beholder. The wound itself becomes the pictorial principle. The presentation of injury and pain have become an issue in Modern and Contemporary Art more than ever. Given the inconceivability of pain in the 20th and 21st century, the artistic technique of naturalistically oriented realism comes to a limit, because they can not cope with the reality of the atrocities. Here, too, the wound becomes a principle of individual picture concepts and, finally, even beyond the usual display of practised and suffered violence. The exhibition presents the wound as a concept of Christian Passion imagination as well as in Modern and Contemporary Art (since the 18th and 19th century). The exhibition aims to create encounters between works of different ages. Concise constellations and contrasts give the opportunity to pursue varied facets of the wound as a motive and image principle, as well as stages, disruptions and passages in its history of development. Besides high-ranking works by medieval masters from noted collections, the exhibition shows works by Josef Albers, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Lovis Corinth, Lucio Fontana, Francisco de Goya, George Grosz, Anish Kapoor, Heinrich Koch, Hermann Nitsch, Arnulf Rainer, Floris van Schooten, Paul Thek, Wilhelm Trübner, Mark Wallinger and others.

The exhibition comprises about fourty works of painting and sculpture, as well as graphic reproductions from Late Middle Ages to present age.

The exhibition accompanies a catalogue (280 pages), to which students of the Faculty of Catholic Theology of the University of Münster and students of the Department of Art History of the Ruhr-University Bochum have contributed.

Lenders: Lindenau-Museum, Altenburg; Kunsthalle, Bielefeld; Privatsammlung, Bochum; Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig; Kunstsammlungen, Chemnitz; Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; Lehmbruck-Museum, Duisburg; Sammlung Morat, Freiburg; Museum Schnütgen, Cologne; Kolumba, Kunstmuseum des Erzbistums Cologne; Anish Kapoor Studio, London; Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg- Hau; Ikonen-Museum, Recklinghausen; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; Museum am Dom, Trier; Museum – Kunstsammlungen, Wiesbaden