Welcome to the exhibition Schwitters: On the Fringes of the Avant-Garde!

Kurt Schwitters is regarded as one of the most important representatives of the 20^th-century avant-garde. His work influenced generations of artists. A boundary-crossing individualist, Schwitters was in contact with a number of artistic movements, including Dadaism and Constructivism.

He called his own method Merz:

“Merz is a standpoint that anyone can adopt. From this standpoint, one can look not only at art but at all things – in short, at the world.”

With Merz, Schwitters sought to transform everyday materials into art and to set a harmonious order against a chaotic, unstable world. In the aftermath of the First World War, his work embodied a spirit of freedom and artistic renewal emerging from the ruins of the past. The most extraordinary manifestation of his “Merz method” was the Merzbau. The artist created it inside a residential building in Hanover, and it is presented in this exhibition as a reconstruction.

Kurt Schwitters’ creative output is extraordinarily wide-ranging: he was a painter, collage and installation artist, graphic designer and typographer, journal editor, writer, poet and performer. At the heart of his worldview lies the principle of collage – the idea of creating art through collecting, assembling and transforming objects, images and words.

Denounced as “degenerate” by the Nazi regime, he lived in exile from 1937 onwards, first in Norway and later in the United Kingdom. There he lived in isolation and under precarious conditions. Nevertheless, he continued to work. His late oeuvre reveals remarkable artistic resilience and an undiminished spirit of experimentation, in which artistic utopia and human tragedy are closely intertwined.

We hope you find the tour engaging and thought-provoking.