OPENING: Christa Jeitner “Beim Eigentlichen ankommen”

While the BLMK’s most recent exhibitions with works from the Brandenburg artist Christa Jeitner (born 1935, Berlin) focused on textile collages, this cabinet exhibition takes a look on her graphic oeuvre from the 1950s to the 1980s.

The line and all the resulting graphic variations shape Christa Jeitner’s entire artistic development across genres. The free sheets and cycles created in the post-war period impress with their formally reduced drawing gestures, which clearly focuses on the essence of an object. In her small-format pen and ink drawings, Christa Jeitner succeeds in giving gestures, postures and facial features a remarkable expressiveness using just a few, often seemingly fragile lines. The line of her architectural drawings is similarly withdrawn, whereby it almost anatomically (de)constructs the architecture into its essential components until only a framework remains.

The artist receives inspiration for her work from visits to the theater, travels through German cities and landscapes and from literary stories and poems by Jean Giono, Johannes Bobrowski, Christian Morgenstern and Wladimir Majakowski. After a break from drawing for several years, Jeitner found a new task in the 1980s with the old town center of Bernau, which was being demolished at the time. She captures the visualization of what will be absent in the future in an almost documentary manner and with rapid, expressive lines. The approaching excavators and cranes drive them forward. Jeitner focuses on ruins and relics that, in their original form, so naturally shaped the (urban) landscape and people’s lives.

“The real thing remains the perceived, which wants to be made visible as an experienced truth,” is the artist’s mantra. But the experienced truth can only be very personal. For Jeitner, “arriving at the real thing” also means arriving at yourself. Her tools are pencils and drawing pens, her subject is what she has seen and experienced.