Moeller Fine Art Berlin presents "Feininger in the Harz," an exhibition showing works from the travels of Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) to Braunlage. The drawings, more than 75 in number, show the path-breaking inspiration that his voyages during the summer months of 1917 and 1918 provided for the artist's work. These unique drawings and the woodcuts based on them, after having been exhibited at the Lyonel-Feininger-Galerie in Quedlinburg, will for the first time be on view in this breadth at Moeller Fine Art. The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of historical documents and information about the artist that illustrate both the context and the importance of these journeys in his overall oeuvre. The works from these two years are striking in their stylistic variety and expressive power. On the one hand, Feininger captures what he sees with an almost meticulous precision, on the other hand the motifs serve as a foundation for transient fugal spatial compositions. Furthermore, the drawings from 1917 and 1918 impressively document a striking change in Feininger's artistic expression. While the nature sketches from 1917 show subtle pencil strokes with rich contrasts and cubistic form, the works from the summer of 1918 exhibit very little nuanced shading, rather achieving their effect through their powerful two-dimensional quality. Not coincidental is a strong formal proximity of these drawings to the medium of the woodcut. Feininger began at the latest by May 1918 with woodcutting and intended to work in Braunlage "eagerly" with this technique, new for him at the time. By the end of the year 1918, he had cut a total of 117 woodblocks that often show motifs from the Harz region. The scope of the drawings in their radical shift is unique in this density in Feininger's work. Together with the highly interesting interactions between woodcut and drawing, the works impressively show the explorations of the artist in terms of the construction of space. His summer stays in Braunlage were not only foundational for Feininger's print work, but above all for his painting.  

Moeller Fine Art is pleased to announce "French Master Drawings from the John C. Whitehead Collection," to take place in its New York gallery from April 14 to May 14, 2010. This exhibition will provide a unique opportunity to view a group of important impressionist and modern drawings by Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, Seurat, Degas, Manet, Renoir, and Rodin, normally not on public view. An illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, and will include a scholarly essay by Isabelle Dervaux, curator of modern and contemporary drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York.  The Whitehead Collection is the result of a 29-year-long collaboration between John C. Whitehead and Achim Moeller. The Hon. John Whitehead has served as co-chair of Goldman Sachs, Deputy Secretary of State under George Shultz, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Director of the New York Stock Exchange, and until recently chairman of The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. He is currently chairman emeritus of The Asia Society, advisory board member of The International Rescue Committee, and chairman of The Financial Services Volunteer Corps. In 2005, Mr. Whitehead published his autobiography, A Life in Leadership: From D-day to Ground Zero.  In 1972, Achim Moeller founded Moeller Fine Art Ltd. in London and moved to New York in 1984. As a leading dealer, Achim Moeller specializes in the purchase and sale of impressionist and modern masterworks. Achim Moeller also represents the Lyonel Feininger Family Trusts, and oversees the Lyonel Feininger and Mark Tobey Projects, providing certificates of authenticity, provenance research, and exhibition consultation relating to the two artists.  Together, John C. Whitehead and Achim Moeller have created an extraordinary group of French paintings, drawings, and sculpture, selections from which have recently been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d'Orsay, and The Royal Academy. This exhibition will provide a unique opportunity to view a group of important impressionist and modern drawings by Daumier, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Matisse, Picasso, Redon, Renoir, Rodin, and Seurat, normally not on public view. An illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, and will include a scholarly essay by Isabelle Dervaux, curator of modern and contemporary drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

Moeller Fine Art, New York is pleased to present a selling exhibition of works by Italian Futurists Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini.  Highlights include Paravento con linea di velocità (c. 1915), a double-sided painting presented in the form of a screen. The work was included in “The Folding Image”, an exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington in 1983. Another work included in the National Gallery exhibition is Linea di velocità e paessaggio. In addition to being signed “Futur Balla”, the work bears the Futurist emblem of the artist on the verso.   

Moeller Fine Art Berlin is pleased to announce “Paul Goesch: Fantastical Reveries”, to take place from 19 November 2010 to 29 January 2011, with an opening reception Thursday, 18 November at 7pm. Twenty five watercolors executed between the 1910s and 1920s will be on view, including images of fantastical architecture, mask-like portraits, and religious / historical scenes.  That tragic and insular life of Paul Goesch is not at odds with his extraordinary imagination and technical ability. Born in Schwerin in 1885, Goesch was trained as an artist in Munich and an architect in Berlin. He worked in both professions before psychological instabilities prevented him from continuing and living on his own. Beginning in 1917, Goesch was admitted to a number of psychiatric clinics which granted him varying degrees of freedom to create art, which was usually fantastical or religious in nature. These minutely rendered images attest to many hours of diligent work, as well as a seemingly infinite mental stock of architectural and loosely historical imagery. In the 1920s, Goesch was a member of the artists’ associations “Die Gläserne Kette“ (The Glass Chain) and “Novembergruppe” (The November Group), alongside Lyonel Feininger, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius, as well as the “Arbeitsrat für Kunst” (Workers council for art). Goesch’s work was abruptly halted in 1934, when he was sent to the Psychiatric Hospital of Brandenburg at Teupitz where the Nazis inflicted forced labor on the artist. He was euthanized in 1940. The extraordinary quality of Goesch's art, inspite of his psychiatric problems, has brought him acclaim as an outsider artist. Many of the artist’s works are included in the collection of psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn now maintained at the University of Heidelberg. His works are also part of the collections of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Berlinische Galerie Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur in Berlin, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Centre Canadien d’Architecture in Montréal.  The gallery would like to thank the Berlinische Galerie Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur for the loan of the works by Paul Goesch and for their help in providing information about his life.

Moeller Fine Art is pleased to announce “Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan,” an artistic collaboration across 130 years between John Burke and Simon Norfolk. The exhibition, which was on view at the Tate Modern from May 6 thru July 10, 2011, will be presented in its entirety by Moeller Fine Art Berlin from September 10 thru November 12, 2011, including 30 unpublished color giclee prints by Burke alongside 30 color giclee prints of Norfolk’s new pictures from Kabul and Helmand, all 51 x 38 cm (20 x 15 in.), and printed and mounted on aluminum by Norfolk. In addition, there are five 115 x 135 cm (40 x 53 in.) giclee prints by Norfolk, also mounted onto aluminium . The exhibition will be organized into three sections: city and landscapes; military bases, and portraiture.  Born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1963 and educated in England, Norfolk gave up photojournalism after he discovered his passion for landscape photography. Norfolk’s fascination for beautiful terrains and the destructive nature of war sets his pictures apart; his work is at once thoroughly researched and stunning in its detail, transcending the visual vocabulary of war. Norfolk recently discovered the work of 19th century Irish photographer John Burke, (1843?-1900) whose photographs were the first ever to be taken in Afghanistan. After applying to the British army as an official photographer, Burke paid his own way to Afghanistan, traveling through the country with a wooden 4 by 5 inch field camera. His eloquent images form an extraordinary record of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880), giving firsthand insight into international conflicts in the Middle East, the same terrain which Norfolk explores today.   Norfolk recognized in Burke’s photographs a humane and critical eye for the British colonial project and in 2010 traveled to Afghanistan in order to follow in his footsteps. In what he terms a collaboration with his Victorian forerunner, Norfolk engaged in a kind of re-photography. The result is a series of superb photographs, which are politically charged, aesthetically beautiful and awe-inspiring. Burke’s diverse photographic output included landscapes, battlefields, archaeological sites, street scenes, portraits of British officers, and ethnological group portraits of Afghans. Rather than artificially re-staging these compositions, Norfolk identified contemporary equivalents, researching and traveling to Burke’s vantage points and developing a digital version of his wet plate technique. As the singular ‘War’ in the exhibition title implies, Norfolk’s project is in part an indictment of the unrelenting impact of conflict and imperialism on the landscape and people of Afghanistan over the past 130 years. The echoing images that result from his partnership with Burke highlight points of continuity and change from either side of the twentieth-century in the war-ravaged country. Through Norfolk’s interest, Burke, a neglected pioneer of war photography, is being brought back to life. The exhibition places both artists on equal ground, both honoring Burke’s pioneering achievements and particular resonance with the Norfolk’s present.  The work of Simon Norfolk has been exhibited at more than thirty public and private institutions worldwide. He has been awarded many prizes including the European Publishers Award for Photography, The Oliver Rebbot Award (Foreign Press Club of America), the Infinity Award (ICP, New York) and Le Prix Dialogue (Arles). His work is in major private and public collections around the world and appears regularly in The New York Times Magazine and the Guardian Weekend. Norfolk already has published three monographs. Afghanistan: chronotopia (2002) has become a landmark in contemporary photography, published in five languages and now in its second edition.  

Moeller Fine Art präsentiert mit PANAMAREKNO 1968-1998 zwölf, zum Teil collageartige Drucke des 1941 in Antwerpen geborenen Panamarenko, die 1998 in einer vom Künstler signierten Auflage von 100 Exemplaren erschienen sind. Die 12 Drucke setzen Panamarenkos selbstgebastelte Modelle für Flugobjekte und Fortbewegungsmittel, die in den Jahren 1968 bis 1998 entstanden sind, zweidimensional ins Bild. Henry van Herwegen, besser bekannt als Panamarenko, hielt sein kunstversiertes Publikum über drei Jahrzehnte aktiv in Aufruhr, bis er sich 2005 öffentlich für den Ruhestand entschied. Mit seinen künstlerischen und zugleich technischen Experimenten vertrat der Antwerpener seit den Sechziger Jahren eine schwer einzuordnende Position in der zeitgenössischen Kunst, die bis heute fasziniert. Panamarenko ist zugleich Künstler, Ingenieur, Physiker, und Erfinder, dessen Vision es ist, den Menschen von der Schwerkraft zu befreien, um neue Formen des Reisens und der Bewegung zu ermöglichen. Zu diesem Zweck schuf der Künstler fantasiereiche Konstruktionen in Form von Luftschiffen, fliegenden Untertassen, mechanischen Hühnern oder rotierenden Käfern von oft monumentalen Ausmaßen, die unter anderem im Pariser Louvre und wiederholt auf der Documenta in Kassel ausgestellt wurden. Seine Modelle sind aber weit mehr als bloße künstlerische Erfindungen. Sie beruhen auf physikalischen Gesetzmäßigkeiten und demonstrieren Panamarenkos intensive Beschäftigung mit Technik, Wissenschaft und Aerodynamik.

Moeller Fine Art New York is pleased to announce "Howard Wise Gallery: Exploring the New" to take place from 22 February to 27 April. The exhibition is an homage to pioneering gallerist Howard Wise and features works by Group Zero, kinetic, and video artists he championed, including Billy Apple, Christo, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Piero Dorazio, Edward Dugmore, Heinz Mack, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, George Rickey, Peter Sedgley, Eric Siegel, and Takis. An illustrated catalogue with an essay by Peter Selz (Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley) will accompany the exhibition.  Howard Wise (1903-1989) opened the Howard Wise Gallery of Present Day Painting and Sculpture in Cleveland, Ohio in 1957. In 1960, he moved his gallery to 50 West 57th Street in New York, and inaugurated the new premises by exhibiting European and American New Tendency artists. Wise was a trailblazing proponent of kinetic sculpture and video art in the US, and foresaw the future of art to be an alliance between artistic and technological concerns. He was also the only gallerist in Europe or America to embrace artists from both continents working in new media, and presented landmark exhibitions such as “On the Move” (1964), the first US exhibition of kinetic art; “Lights in Orbit” (1967), a major US survey of art using moving light; and “TV as a Creative Medium” (1969), the first-ever gallery exhibition devoted to video as an art form. In 1971, at the height of its success, Wise closed his gallery and established Electronic Arts Intermix, a foundation assisting artists and organizations working within the emerging video art movement. Highlights of Moeller Fine Art's exhibition include Otto Piene’s Licht Ballett (1969), a chrome round table and hanging globe containing revolving lamps that project light on the walls, ceiling and floor; Heinz Mack’s Veil of Light (1964), a large sheet of aluminum hex cells that reflect light; and Billy Apple’s Unidentified Fluorescent Object [UFO] (1967), a neon light sculpture.

Moeller Fine Art Berlin is pleased to announce the exhibition "R.B. Kitaj," on view from November 3, 2012 - February 16, 2013. The exhibition will run concurrently with the retrospective "R.B. Kitaj: Obsessions" at the nearby Jewish Museum Berlin, through January 27, 2013. Moeller Fine Art's exhibition presents 15 important paintings created during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. All works are for sale. R. B. (Ronald Brooks) Kitaj (1932-2007) is among the best-known of the figurative painters of the “The London School,” a name Kitaj coined in a catalog essay for his 1976 retrospective at the Arts Council of Great Britain, London. Kitaj's honors include election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982. In 1985, he became the first American since John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) to be elected to the Royal Academy. Numerous retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held, including those at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, the Tate Gallery, London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. For Kitaj, art was a medium of intellectual exploration, which he mined using references from history, art, literature, pop culture, and his own life. These complex compositions of disorienting landscapes and impossible three dimensional constructions are built up using a montage of images, which he called 'agitational usage'. This juxtaposition is not only one of space but also of time; The Room (Rue St. Denis), 1982-83, exhibited at the Tate retrospective in 1994 and included in the gallery’s exhibition, refers to Kitaj's life and its connection to that of Pablo Picasso: "the year that I lived in Paris, I painted this room which is in the mile-long street which I have haunted since I was eighteen, a street Picasso also loved but I don't know if he ever painted it or its small rooms."  Kitaj was also a voracious reader and sought to communicate both through image and text. He accompanied many of his works with explanatory “prefaces” and identified with the “painter-scribbler” Vincent van Gogh, to whom he paid homage with After Vincent (2nd Transaction), 2006. For the “preface” of the painting My First Time (Havana, 1949), 1990, also included in the exhibition, Kitaj wrote:  I’ve been possessed by a very occasional semi-secret life, not at all uncommon to judge only by erotic art and literature of many cultures, and its bittersweet addictions have fascinated me since my First Time in Havana forty-five years ago (Flaubert says ‘He has not lived’ who has not been drawn into and shamed by this ill-famed addiction), but when I think that a rare beauty has transpired in my secret life, not unlike any other experience of nature which one tries to commit to canvas, I feel it may belong to painting, even when I suspect that the bitter undertaste of the sensual port and its streets of shame may be unknowable to many people, and so it seems to me that if I can recall some sense of sexual drama, as in this bildungsroman about my lost youth, the singular tense in art may be faintly heard and one’s youth may even seem regained.  

In collaboration with the The Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, Moeller Fine Art is pleased to announce “Lyonel Feininger: Master Printmaker,” an exhibition of over fifty woodcuts from the artist’s personal collection. The exhibition will open in New York after a successful presentation at Moeller Fine Art Berlin. Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) first began making woodcuts in the spring of 1918, a year before Walter Gropius appointed him the first Master of Form in the Bauhaus print shop in Weimar. Skillful, virtuosic, and prolific he had cut more than 100 woodblocks by the end of 1918 and created the majority of these works within only three years. The woodcuts, created between 1918 and 1928, reflect the artist’s varied stylistic elements from the whimsical to the cubistic and prismatic. The exhibition also includes Feininger's “nature studies,” drawings en plein air that served as the starting point for the artist’s work. Such motifs from nature recur in Feininger’s œuvre, as T. Lux (1910-2011), his youngest son, wrote: “[they] consisted of the re-casting and re-drawing of a given composition, abandoning it and then taking it up again a day or a year or twenty-five years after, in any and all of the media.” In a rare painting, Chapel in the Woods, 1943, Feininger even reconceived a woodblock print in oil on canvas.  Since the gallery opened in 1972, Moeller Fine Art has been closely linked to Lyonel Feininger and is the primary gallery for collectors and institutions seeking to purchase and sell works by the artist. Achim Moeller represents the Lyonel Feininger Family Trusts and is Managing Principal of the Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, providing research and expertise concerning works attributed to the artist. Mr. Moeller is currently preparing the three-volume catalogue raisonné of paintings by Lyonel Feininger.

Moeller Fine Art Berlin is pleased to present "þurrlendi," (pronounced "frürrländy") a selection of paintings and drawings from the 1980s by Icelandic artist Gunar Örn Gunnarsson (1946–2008). The title of the exhibition comes from the Icelandic word for land or earth, as Gunnarsson's work from this period focuses on the Icelandic folk tradition and its strong relation to nature, filled with dream-like images which recall a distant, mythological past. A self-taught artist who has become one of Iceland’s leading artistic figures nationally and internationally, Gunnar Örn Gunnarsson was discovered by Guggenheim museum curator Edward F. Fry, who was an early champion of his work. Gunnarsson's paintings of the 1980s contrast with the more abstract style of many of his Icelandic contemporaries, including those of his close friend Olafur Eliasson, whose mentor he was. Initially inspired by the nation’s traditional artistic concern with nature and the human connection, Gunnarsson’s paintings in the 1980s show human and animal figures—and sometimes hybrids of the two—intertwined within the landscape. His expressionistic approach, deft brushwork and strong use of color demonstrate a master of figurative and spiritually charged painting. Eliason writes about his friend, "It was Gunnar’s ability to transform landscape forms, whether symbolic, metaphoric, or naturalistic, that taught me not only to see the world around me but to consider our movement through the landscape as an inseparable part of it." (2009) Gunnar Örn Gunnarsson lived in Kambur, Iceland, in close contact with the landscape and wildlife that inspired his work so strongly. Gunnarsson represented his country at the Bienal de São Paulo in 1985 and at the Venice Biennale in 1989. His works may be found in public collections worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, The National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik, The Seibu Museum, Tokyo, The Moderna Museet and the National Gallery of Sweden, Stockholm. Gunnar Örn Gunnarsson also had solo exhibitions at Moeller Fine Art, New York in 1985 and 1989 and at Moeller Fine Art, Berlin in 2010.

Moeller Fine Art is pleased to announce "ZERO in Vibration –Vibration in ZERO," a collaboration with the ZERO Foundation, Düsseldorf, and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, on view from 13 October 2014 through 9 January 2015. The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Otto Piene (1928–2014). In 1958 Otto Piene and Heinz Mack (later joined by Günther Uecker) formed the ZERO group in Düsseldorf, whose aim, Piene wrote, was to create "a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning." Their art championed kinetic, light and minimalist elements expressed in new media, such as chrome, aluminum, latex and motors, providing a counterpoint to Abstract Expressionism in post-war Europe. 

In 1958 the group published its second art magazine on the occasion of a series of studio exhibitions dedicated to "Vibration," including works by Oskar Holweck, Heinz Mack, Almir Mavignier and Otto Piene, centered on the theme of visual movement. 

 In 1959 ZERO came before an international public with the landmark exhibition "Motion in Vision – Vision in Motion," at the Hessenhuis, Antwerp, an artist-curated exhibition, and over the following decade gained participants throughout the world: Piero Dorazio, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni in Italy; Bernard Aubertin, Yves Klein and François Morellet in France; Walter Leblanc in Belgium; Jesús Rafael Soto in Venezuela; and Hermann Goepfert, Christian Megert and Almir Mavignier in Germany.
 "ZERO in Vibration – Vibration in ZERO," organized on the 30th anniversary of Moeller Fine Art in New York and the 55th anniversary of "Motion in Vision – Vision in Motion," finds fresh resonance in the literal, optical and potential vibrations of ZERO. Highlights include Veil of Light, 1964, by Heinz Mack, a pulsating plane of reflective hexcells; 2 trames de chevrons superposées, 1961, by François Morellet; and Rosso di sotto, 1961, by Piero Dorazio, a vibrant, intersecting grid painted on canvas. 

 The exhibition includes loans from the Neuberger Museum's George and Edith Rickey Collection of Constructivist Art, the ZERO Foundation and works for sale from private collections. An illustrated catalogue, with texts by Mattijs Visser (Director, ZERO Foundation) and Serge Lemoine, accompanies the show, which runs parallel to "ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–1960s" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the first exhibition based on international research projects initiated by the ZERO Foundation. Moeller Fine Art has contributed to the Guggenheim Museum's exhibition with the loan of two works by Otto Piene, Light Satellite and Light Drum, 1969.

MARCH 30 – JULY 17, 2015

In 1918, Feininger began to make pencil drawings of ships, seascapes and small figures with top hats, perhaps inspired by motifs he saw in Braunlage, a picturesque town in the Harz mountains. The artist translated many of these drawings into woodcuts. Fifty of these mostly unpublished, spontaneous drawings for woodcuts are exhibited at Moeller Fine Art alongside a collection of 68 hand-carved and painted wooden houses and figures and 15 "Ghosties," small watercolors that Feininger gave his family and friends on holidays and special occasions. Beginning in 1919, Feininger took scraps of wood and made little characters and houses for his children and friends-- a tradition he continued until his last Christmas in 1955. These works were collectively referred to as the “City at the Edge of the World” by Feininger's youngest son, T. Lux. Over the years, the artist presented these 68 hand-carved and painted wooden figures, houses, animals and a bridge to Andreas, his eldest son, and Wysse, Andreas's wife, who treasured them and kept them together as a group. This is the largest grouping of such works that exists in a single collection, and is unique because all the toys were given directly to Andreas and Wysse. Perhaps the most intimate of all of the works in this exhibition, however, are the “Ghosties,” created in the late 1940s and early 1950s, which offer a glimpse into Lyonel Feininger’s personal world. The gift of a "Ghostie" was an expression of affection from the artist, or from "Papileo," as he was addressed by his family and friends.  

Today is Théodore Rousseau's birthday. This leading artist of the Barbizon School was born in Paris on April 15, 1812. In celebration, I'm pleased to share with you our latest online exhibition, Théodore Rousseau (1812—1867). Albert Wolff wrote enthusiastically of Rousseau’s work in 1886: Rousseau renders with the same mastery, the smile of creation and its terrors, the broad open plain and the mysterious forest, the limpid, sun-bright sky or the heaping of the clouds.... He has understood all, rendered all with equal genius.... He has been by turns as much a poet as Corot, as melancholy as Millet, as awful as Dupré; he is the most complete, for he embraces landscape art absolutely. One of the highlights of the exhibition is a large, detailed landscaped drawing, Habitations sous des chênes dans les Landes, (after 1844). It exemplifies Rousseau’s mastery of precision and form. Its majestic central tree, with luxuriant foliage, towers over a sunny pasture. The small cottage nestled in the left hand corner serves as a quiet reminder of humankind's humbleness in the face of nature.