First Leipzig Autumn Salon

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The 1st Leipzig Autumn Salon was a semi-legal exhibition held from November 15, 1984 to December 7, 1984 in the Leipzig Exhibition Center on the market . The artists Lutz Dammbeck , Günter Firit, Hans-Hendrik Grimmling , Frieder Heinze , Günther Huniat and Olaf Wegewitz organized the exhibition on their own.

history

Although there was no public advertising campaign, the 1st Leipzig Autumn Salon recorded a large number of visitors, and the news of the unusual exhibition had got around in the alternative scene. The name of the exhibition referred to Herwarth Walden's First German Autumn Salon in the Sturm Gallery in Berlin in 1913, which in turn was modeled on the Paris Salon d'Automne .

The six artists had already taken part in large GDR exhibitions, but had failed several times due to censorship with their own multimedia projects. They had little in mind with official socialist realism ; They didn't show heroes of work in their pictures, but people who had fallen and stumbled, they painted surrealistic - abstract , thematized walls and borders, dealt with German dictatorship history. Frieder Heinze, Lutz Dammbeck and Hans-Hendrik Grimmling graduated from the Leipzig University of Graphics and Book Art . Günter Firit, Günther Huniat and Olaf Wegewitz lived as autodidacts in Leipzig.

When the artists signed the contract for the secretly planned “autumn salon” with the Leipzig trade fair office, they pretended to the landlords that they were acting on behalf of the state VBK . The rent for the four-week use of the 627 m 2 exhibition area was 12,000 GDR marks and had to be borne by the artists themselves. In doing so, they took a significant financial risk. It was the only chance to undermine the monopoly of the cultural bureaucracy, because every public action in the GDR was subject to approval. The work was driven to the exhibition center in the truck of a befriended scrap dealer. The construction of the exhibition was not easy: no nails were allowed to be hammered into the walls. They improvised; B. clamps around columns, tensioned ropes and hung their work on it.

Shortly before the opening, attempts were made to prevent the exhibition. The approval was given by the SED Central Committee in Berlin , as it was intended to avoid arousing the interest of the Western media by a violent closure, which would have caused an uproar. The exhibition was finally allowed to take place as a workshop exhibition with various editions, but similar actions should be prevented in the future. Further planned "autumn salons" were prevented. As a consequence of open threats, Firit, Grimmling and Dammbeck later left for the West . Huniat, Heinze and Wegewitz stayed in the GDR. The participants took different paths artistically and personally.

However, their role model caught on. This is how the Eigen + Art gallery was created with the participation of the artists represented by the gallery.

Deutschlandfunk rated the autumn salon as a “milestone on the way to the implosion of the GDR”.

Movie

Lutz Dammbeck : 1st Leipzig Autumn Salon, GDR / FRG 1984–2006, documentary 30 min., Camera Thomas Plehnert

literature

  • Lutz Dammbeck, Günter Firit, Hans-Hendrik Grimmling, Frieder Heinze , Günther Huniat and Olaf Wegewitz: 1st Leipzig Autumn Salon. Artist book, Mogollon production, Leipzig 1984.
  • Olaf Wegewitz and Frieder Heinze: Unaulutu. Pebbles in the sand. Leipzig 1985, Edition Brusberg West Berlin 1986.
  • Catalog Boheme and Dictatorship in the GDR. Groups, conflicts, neighborhoods 1970–1989 . Exhibition by the DHM Berlin, 1997.
  • Revolution in a closed space. The other culture in Leipzig 1970–1990 . Edited by Uta Grundmann, Klaus Michael and Susanna Seufert, Leipzig 2002.
  • Hans-Hendrik Grimmling : The reeducation of birds. A painter's life, Halle 2008.
  • Doris Liebermann : A pirate piece. The 1st Leipzig Autumn Salon 1984, its history and its protagonists, Halle 2015.
  • Hendrikje Hüneke: The artist book UNAULUTU. Evidence of indigenous peoples as artistic inspiration in the GDR, Baden-Baden 2016.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Doris Liebermann: First Leipziger Herbstsalon 1984 and its consequences. Eigensinn und EigenArt , Deutschlandfunk Kultur, accessed on September 1, 2019