Opening: Friday, 16.09.2022 – 6 pm
Exhibition: Saturday, 17.09.2022 – Wednesday, 21.09.2022
Opening hours: 0-24 h.
Kulturbahnhof Kassel

Throughout the ages, artists have tried to capture and record the beauty, drama and enigmatic magic of clouds.

Delicate veils, peaceful little flocks, lush towers and ominously dark foreboding storms – in painting they play the most diverse roles – from quiet extras to leading actors. It is impossible to say who has formed the most impressive with the brush. Titian with his pink shimmering reflections or Tiepolo, who conjured them up on ceiling paintings, Constable, who varied them in countless studies, William Turner, who dissolved the boundaries between heaven and earth, or Caspar David Friedrich, who often devoted the entire picture surface to them and placed us little humans tiny in the great whole. Alfred Sisley, Paula Modersohn Becker, Anselm Kiefer, Emil Nolde, Gerhard Richter – there are countless works that show that the skyscapes have always been and still are teachers for the artists who create them.

Even if in the 19th century the English apothecary Luke Howard began to classify clouds and today we can divide them scientifically, for example into cirrus, cumulus or citrostatus, even if since Gustave Le Gray we can apparently stop them with the camera:

In the clouds, many have believed for millennia, perhaps the divine dwells after all, and there is something comforting about the kitschy notion that the loved ones we have lost dwell in them and pass over us as angels relaxed in white, fluffy feather pillows.

The fascination with the constantly new spectacle in the firmament, forming, changing and passing away, can also be felt in Katharina Schnitzler‘s work AUFLÖSUNG. The clouds as a metaphor for our human existence. After all, in the end the formations above us are only a collection of very fine, misty water droplets in the atmosphere, which in the artist’s imagination dissolve in a reconciliatory connection with finiteness.

Text: Annette Schneider