created. broken. protected.

The exhibition brings together key sculptures from Friedrich Press’s secular oeuvre—nudes, faces, mother-and-child groups—and places them in a charged dialogue with Stefan Hurtig’s video work  Solidarities. 

Friedrich Press’s sculptures occupy a space shaped by major art historical developments of the twentieth century and are marked as much by biographical ruptures as by epochal caesuras of modernism. His journey from expressive early works, which attracted considerable attention at exhibitions like the Berlin Academy in 1932, to a strict reduction and abstraction in the post-war era, points to influences from major artists such as Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz who, like Press, addressed existential questions of humanity in their sculpture. In particular, Press’s sense of block-like form, woundedness, and fragmentation links his figures to the expressive visual language of interwar modernism and emphasizes a conditio humana characterized by trauma, suffering, hope, and community. 

The break with the strict ideals of classical modernism after 1945, exemplified by Press in both his sacred and secular works, is reflected in his mother-and-child sculptures and nudes as well as in his church designs: the figures appear broken, with rough surfaces, often reduced to essential signifiers, thus creating a resonance between individual vulnerability and collective security. His references to the sacred space and simultaneous translation of human closeness and the search for protection (in the motif of mother and child) turn his art into a bridge between transcendence and everyday experience. 

Stefan Hurtig’s contemporary contribution updates this art-historical reflection for the digital age. Here, too, the motif of community, security, and fragility remains central, transformed into a new visual language. Hurtig picks up the tensions inherent in Press’s work—humans as created and broken beings in search of security—and translates them into the fragmented, digitally networked biographies of the present. 

 The exhibition title “created. broken. protected.” (geschaffen. gebrochen. geborgen.) reflects this central art-historical movement: from creation through material and form (“created”), through biographical and societal ruptures (“broken”), toward a security continually sought anew in interpersonal relationships and art (“protected”)—a trajectory that extends from modernism to the present across the works of Friedrich Press and Stefan Hurtig.