Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection features works by a group of seven artists who chose to study at the Leipzig Art Academy in former East Germany, in the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This was an unlikely decision at a time when the inhabitants of Leipzig were leaving in droves for the West, and when the main currents of art flowed away from painting, toward video, photography, and installation art.

The Leipzig paintings are expressive of the contemporary German neologism Ostalgie, a combination of Ost (east) and Nostalgie (nostalgia), which denotes this longing for the GDR. Unready to face the new, they are nostalgic for the old, but more from habit than any affection. The untimely embrace of a shrinking East German city and conventional medium is imprinted on the pictures, but rather than buckling under the weight of place, time, and tradition, they convey something surprising and subjective. The mystery of these pictures, with their out-of-date sources and classical techniques, is their utter and beguiling singularity. The exhibition’s co-curators, Mark Coetzee, director and curator of the Rubell Family Collection and Laura Heon, director and curator of SITE Santa Fe, will speak about their experience in organizing this timely exhibition.

Co-sponsored by Chiaroscuro Gallery