A Tribute to David Bowie HAUPTSTRASSE
On January 8, 2013, David Bowie surprised the world by releasing a video for his new song Where Are We Now, a touching and nostalgic reflection on his years in Berlin, coinciding with the announcement of his first new album in ten years – The Next Day, set to be released that month. In no time, we decided to change the spring program of the gallery and organize a tribute to this exceptional artist and performer for March to May.
It is now widely known that David Bowie lived at Schöneberger Hauptstraße 155 in West Berlin. However, Hauptstraße also has a literal meaning – in Berlin, the artist, who had burned out in many ways by mid-1976, found his way back to the main road of his life, back to David Bowie. David Jones, a.k.a. David Bowie, a.k.a. Ziggy Stardust, a.k.a. Thin White Duke, needed to escape a life situation that threatened to consume him – he sought peace and anonymity, the freedom to do what he wanted. He found this in the divided city. Hugo Wilcken wrote: "Berlin was an island, cut off from the world, yet large enough to lose oneself in. Every layer of the myth of Berlin seemed to reflect an aspect of Bowie's persona – the artists of Expressionism, the cabaret decadence, the Nazi megalomania, the devastating destruction, the isolation behind the wall, the oppressions of the Cold War, the ghosts that never fade. Above all – Berlin had something unreal." Or, as Bowie sings in Where Are We Now: "A man lost in time near KaDeWe…"
In Berlin, Bowie healed and managed to create something artistically significant with groundbreaking impact: The "Berlin Trilogy," consisting of the three albums Low, 'Heroes', and Lodger, along with the Iggy Pop albums The Idiot and Lust for Life, which he produced, are still considered some of the best rock albums of all time.
Our exhibition aims to trace Bowie's Berlin years through works by Abetz & Drescher, Claus Feldmann, Rainer Fetting, K.H. Hödicke, Ivar Kaasik, Wolfgang Neumann, Tim Plamper, Joachim Seinfeld, and Snapple, featuring painting, drawing, photography, and short texts, approaching the phenomenon of Bowie and hinting at the atmosphere of Berlin in the 1970s.