(Hi)stories

The “Lepanto” cycle is one of Cy Twombly’s major works and consists of twelve paintings that are exhibited permanently in a separate room at Museum Brandhorst. Vibrant hues in a broad palette of yellows, reds, turquoise and aquamarine define the drama of the monumental paintings. The action on the canvases intensifies, all the artist’s painting tools and painterly gestures are used expressively.

Jean-Michel Basquiat combined symbols, words, letters and drawings in his picture. The painting is untitled, but because of the unique mixture of recognizable signs and traces you can read much from it as a viewer. With oil paint and oil pastels, the artist painted restlessly diverse references ranging from European cultural history to African-American counterculture.

Arthur Jafa points the camera directly at his mirror image. He stares at us with his penetrating gaze. The artist developed the photo at human scale, thus confronting the self-portrait even more directly with the person viewing it. What is notable for his photography is his work on developing sensitive techniques for representing black and dark tones on film. Throughout the image, black and white flow into one another.

This room represents an exact replica of the Buchholz & Buchholz Gallery, where Wolfgang Tillmans exhibited his photographs in 1993. Here the artist tested a form of presentation in which photographs, photocopies, and reproductions of magazine pages stand side by side on an equal footing and are distributed throughout the room.

A painted mannequin is at the center of this picture. She is placed in an interior full of specially-designed objects. Marble, wooden and silky materials. A book about the dramatic staging of fashion. And a map of Glasgow, Lucy McKenzie’s birthplace, which is hung as wallpaper.

The photo of the singer Elvis Presley in the role of a gangster is the basis for this work. Andy Warhol repeated the same motif three times on a silver canvas. This repetition was made possible by the silkscreen technique, in which Andy Warhol saw many advantages for his artistic work. The pale figure of Elvis stands out against the metallic background as if in an old film or fog.

The photograph is part of the series “Recollections in America” by the US- American artist David LaChapelle. In this photo, a lively party seems to be in progress. But the celebration gets out of hand: a child is given the coffee liquor Kahlua in a flask. A gun and a grenade are lying on the dresser. Is the photo staged or did the photographer take a snapshot of a bizarre party?

“Faux Shop” is a sculptural installation and at the same time a shop window for a fashion collection. The shop window mimics a women's clothing store. Lucy McKenzie painted the marbled parts of the installation herself in an illusionistic manner. Like moving ghosts, the clothes were either pinned to the walls, placed in the display, or suspended dynamically from wires. The clothes are from Atelier E.B, a collaborative fashion label and research studio that Lucy McKenzie runs with designer Beca Lipscombe.