BEUYS – We are the revolution
October 3, 2008 - January 25, 2009
Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery of the Present

Recently, there has been a strikingly high level of international interest in the work and figure of Joseph Beuys, particularly among the younger generation of artists and art historians. There are also various themed and dialogue exhibitions such as “all in the present must be transformed”. “Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys” at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin/New York or “Mythos. Joseph Beuys, Matthew Barney, Douglas Gordon, Cy Twombly” at the Kunsthaus Bregenz have recently tried to confront Beuys with the present.

The Nationalgalerie in Hamburger Bahnhof is taking this growing trend as an opportunity to dedicate a comprehensive exhibition for the first time to one of the greatest German artists of the post-war period. The exhibition “BEUYS. We are the revolution” will be shown from October 3, 2008 to January 25, 2009 in the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Aktuell – Berlin and represents a highlight of the series of exhibitions on the cult of the artist taking place in several houses of the Berlin State Museums.

The exhibition examines the unique phenomenon of the 20th century of a reshaping of all social conditions through art in terms of its historical, philosophical, theological, political, scientific and artistic roots. For the first time, the entire context is explained using documents, writings, films and photographs. The exhibition is spread over an area of ​​around 5,000 square meters in the main building of the Hamburger Bahnhof. It represents a unique opportunity to show the major Beuys works from the Marx Collection as well as the wealth of audiovisual materials from the holdings of the Joseph Beuys Media Archive in a vital, dialogical comparison with rarely borrowed works from all over Europe.

The BEUYS retrospective creates an important continuation of the international debate on the artistic legacy of one of the most influential and controversial artists of the 20th century. The Revolution is a lively, energetic environment in which museum visitors have the opportunity to examine and directly experience Beuys' universe. There is no hagiography here: neither monumental nor sacred in its approach, the planned presentation focuses more on the open work and, above all, on Beuys himself: as an artist, as a thinker, as a human being. Because the iconic meaning of Beuys rests as much on what the artist embodied, on what he was and is, what he said and did, as on the objects he created.

20 years after the last comprehensive exhibition in Germany, which was followed by major exhibitions in Zurich, Paris and London, at a time when the crisis of meaning in contemporary art is gaining ever greater resonance, a comprehensive analysis of Beuys' programmatic assertion “The revolution is us” against the background of his artistic, social, philosophical, political and ecological commitment, contemporary, explosive, if not downright groundbreaking.

In 16 chapters, the exhibition shows all of these unusual areas of work for an artist, his examination of the concepts of work, thinking, sculpture, democracy, pedagogy, economics, money, law and Christianity. In addition, all forms of his rich art production are expanded from drawing, sculpture, objects, environments, film to language work, which repeatedly refer to his basic ideas of a revolutionary change in society. Once again, the man in the hat, once so well-known and constantly present in the media, with his significant clothing but also memorable language, returns to the room with his enigmatic actions. His popular, yet spectacular large-scale projects, such as the “honey pump at work” and the planting of 7,000 oak trees as a social-ecological work of art are presented. The co-founder of the Green Party and friend of Andy Warhol, Heinrich Böll, Rudi Dutschke, Marcel Broodthaers and many other contemporaries, the great reformer Joseph Beuys is asked about the value of his ideas for our society today. In numerous film documents he himself speaks to the audience or appears silently as an actionist; his relationship to all things in life is laid out in hundreds of drawings. The audience is confronted not only with a universalist work, but with a cosmos that is deeply anchored in the intellectual history of Europe.