European Realities

Coronavirus, energy crisis, inflation, populism and a resurgence of nationalist tendencies – this is how the 2020s began.
A devastating world war, the Spanish flu, the global economic crisis, National Socialism – this was the 1920s.
The Chemnitz Art Collections brought together the realism movements of the 1920s and 1930s as a pan-European movement in an exhibition for the first time. A world that had fallen apart found its artistic expression in art that emphasised reality. The existential fears of poverty, hunger, disease and social decline were clearly evident in it.
The endangerment of 20th-century ideals, such as the belief in progress, was already apparent. The exhibition linked the themes of that time with our current socio-political present, thus raising the question of new visions for the future.