Exhibition Text

The Kunstverein für Mecklenburg und Vorpommern in Schwerin presents an intergenerational duo exhibition, bringing together the work of the Schwerin-born artist and architect Paul Goesch (1885–1940) with that of Austrian painter Matthias Noggler (*1990). Rather than taking a biographical approach, the exhibition establishes a pictorial dialogue between Goesch’s architectonic and visual concepts and Noggler’s contemporary paintings. Central to the exhibition is the artists’ shared interest in questions of space, image production, and the representation of social structures.

Paul Goesch remains an underappreciated artist of the early 20th-century avant-garde. As a painter and architect he was active within pioneering artistic networks such as the Arbeitsrat für Kunst; the Novembergruppe; and the Gläserne Kette, initiated by Bruno Taut. His work embodies a practice in which architectural utopia, aesthetic vision, and subjective experience are uniquely intertwined. Although trained as an architect, it was primarily in painting that Goesch found his own personal form of artistic expression. Accordingly, his pictorial spaces should be understood less as concrete building proposals than conceptual models for understanding alternative forms of community, perception, and both built and imagined spaces.

Goesch’s repeated stays in psychiatric institutions – which ultimately led to his murder by the Nazis as part of their so-called euthanasia programme – played a major role in his work’s long-term exclusion from the art-historical canon, with it instead being primarily categorised as Art Brut or Outsider Art. Both the French and English term denote art that is located outside of established academic and institutional networks, and historically has been particularly associated with artists in psychiatric facilities or in otherwise societally marginal positions. In the case of Goesch, this already questionable categorisation proves to be particularly inadequate, as it fails to take into account his close association with the artistic discourse and network of the historical avant-garde. This exhibition at the Kunstverein is the first presentation of Goesch’s work in his birthplace, Schwerin, thus aiming to honour an artist whose extraordinary œuvre has only in recent years begun to receive art-historical recognition.

Much like Paul Goesch, Matthias Noggler’s artistic practice is concerned with the spatial conditions of social structures. At the heart of his work lies the question of how systems of order are produced through social relationships, power dynamics, and cultural attributions, and how they, in turn shape ways of seeing the world and patterns of behaviour. His works are fundamentally informed by a conscious reflection on the political, social and historical dimensions of painting, as well as its potential to represent social reality. Returning motifs such as scenes from daily life, urban architecture, and abstract spatial structures explore the relationship between individual perception and collective experiences, exposing the painterly space as a site of social negotiation.

For this exploration, Noggler draws from diverse traditions of image-making – from architectural drawings and biblical iconography, to cultures of documentary imagery and infographics – and translates them into a contemporary visual language that toes the line between concrete observation and abstraction. Key aspects within this exhibition are late-modern architectural proposals – in which city, landscape, and infrastructure are presented as plannable and controllable systems – as well as historical systems of symbols, and pictograms. Their claims of universality, comprehensibility, and objectivity are taken up in Noggler’s paintings, reflected upon, and reinterpreted in new visual contexts.

The work of Paul Goesch is a central and repeated point of artistic reference for Matthias Noggler – as well as for this duo exhibition itself. Building on this premise, the exhibition brings different series from each of the artists into dialogue, seeking to reveal common painterly interests which, despite temporal distance, are explored through their respective works. Thus parallels emerge not only on the level of subject matter, but also of the specific construction of pictorial spaces: in the architectonic layout of the composition, the intensity of colour, the dissolution of classical spatial arrangements, and in the intentional skewing of perspective and scale.

Both Goesch and Noggler develop visual worlds that hover between concrete figuration and imaginary construction, and in which social, psychological and aesthetic layers of meaning overlap. Their images understand space not as a given condition, but as a dynamic process. The interplay between deliberate planning and subjective experience, normative systems and individual appropriation, as well as claims of representation and artistic autonomy forms both the thematic and formal core of their practice. While Goesch’s works explore new forms of social imagination against the backdrop of the historical avant-garde, Noggler examines, from a contemporary perspective, the conditions and constructions of modernity’s imaginary worlds and their lingering effects in the present. In this sense, art historical classifications and attributions become sites of reflection in their own right.

Translation: Ella Křivánek