Moritz Götze - Cranach Goethe Götze
We warmly invite you and your friends to our Frankfurt gallery for the opening with the artist on Saturday, November 21 at 2 PM.
Christmas break from December 24 to January 9.
Goethe praised Cranach's depictions of bare skin, stating that "in terms of truth and bloom," he could "stand alongside Titian." The poet was unaware of the genealogical connection that linked him to the painter, who was one of his ancestors.
Lukas Cranach the Elder was - as curious as it is wonderful - an ancestor of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Cranach's daughter Magdalena was married to the Saxon chancellor Christian Brück. From this lineage comes Goethe's mother, making Cranach Goethe's great-great-grandfather. This connection is quite fitting, as Moritz Götze has been cultivating a significant Goethe-Cranach obsession for several years. Such a remarkable kinship calls for a companion exhibition, and voilà: CRANACH GOETHE GÖTZE!
Once again, Götze depicts Mr. Goethe lounging among ruins in the Campagna, covered by a plaid, but in a very different style than Tischbein, using the forms of his "German Pop" and his technique of multi-part enamel composition.
The hero steps into the present. Even "Venus and Amor" leave the mystically dark realm of timelessness, which they inhabit in the Hermitage version of the older Cranach, and wander through a slightly littered central German landscape, under a blue sky where wind turbines spin.
"In the mid-nineties, the self-taught artist made it as a guest professor at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris. In the GDR, the young artist was ridiculed, but in the new Berlin, he was allowed to decorate the Ministry of Economics with a mural.
Götze has received awards and is considered one of the favorites among German collectors. He is now almost omnipresent." (Ulrike Knöfel)
"What impresses about Moritz Götze is this lightness without losing depth, and the method, which was indeed one of collecting. He had already established this in the 80s.
He created a private pop universe, not fed by the billboards of American pop art, but with his own memories and things he loved and worked with… I find a spontaneous access that immediately seduces and intrigues." (Eckhart Gillen)
"If history is a darkroom, then Götze belongs to the light-makers. He allows himself an unclouded view, free from ideology." (Christoph Tannert)
"He bestows poetry upon the misfortunes of strangeness, the littered planet, the forgotten or stunted between window sills, beaches, and skies of air warfare, always maintaining the poetry of a final untouched state, the weight of an unquestionable existence, thus also a sense of wonder, because for him, the event matters, not its reason. To see it this way makes him an artist; to show it this way makes him Götze." (Michael Freitag)