Neue Sachlichkeit Cat. CFA Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin

“I must paint you! I simply must!” said Otto Dix to Sylvia von Harden when he ran into her on the street. “You are representative of an entire epoch!” Clearing out her closet of the heavy dresses that burdened her mother’s generation and replacing them with a cigarette and a perky bob, the “New Woman” of the 1920s had become a myth of its own. The frozen iconography of that time, largely created by the media, was being challenged and explored in her many facets by the female artists and writers of the time. Until recently, many of them have been half-forgotten. Without question, the “New Woman” of the Weimar Republic didn’t exist, but there were plenty of new women. Fast forward a hundred years and a lot has changed, but a lot hasn’t. Amidst the all-pervasiveness of digital image phenomena, contemporary artists gathered in this brochure revisit the notions of objectivity and facticity through their distinct takes on figuration and representation. Indeed, in a time when the flâneuse is no more and the scrolleuse takes her place, as the world unfolds at our fingertips, the real and the surreal are bound to get mixed up. Artists: Jagoda Bednarski, Genesis Belanger, Ellen Berken

Dana Žaja: born in 1994, studied art history and comparative literature at the University of Zagreb and in the master’s program at the FU Berlin with a concentration on contemporary art. Nicole Hackert and Bruno Brunnet (the founder of the gallery in 1992) are a permanent part of the international gallery world with CFA situated now at Grolmanstraße in Berlin/Charlottenburg. Their work is an inherent part of the beginning of the artistic careers of Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Sarah Lucas, Jonathan Meese, Raymond Pettibon, TAL R, Daniel Richter, Christian Rosa, Dana Schutz, Norbert Schwontkowski, Katja Strunz, Juergen Teller, or Marianne Vitale, just to name a few.