The 1980s have often been misjudged as conservative or artistically sterile. In reality, the decade was characterized by radical upheavals. The east-west conflict was gradually defused, and the contours of the era of globalization emerged with increasing clarity. To an unprecedented degree, contemporary art received the attention of a wider public, and was reshaped as an important component of the “culture industry.”

In Düsseldorf, the internationally oriented art scene of the 1960s and 70s, exemplified by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers, continued to exercise a strong influence on the academy milieu and the gallery scene. Here, younger artists like Schütte, Mucha, Gerdes, and Fritsch signaled their mistrust of the purported breakthrough to Neo-expressionist painting — a tendency which shaped broad swathes of German art production at that time. Instead, they attempted to revive the critical potential of the avant-garde, in the process striving to expand and transform it in enduring ways. Acquiring greater emphasis now were the pictorial, metaphor, narrative, memory, and mise en scène.

In their art, late Modernism reflects upon itself, while at the same time opening itself up to the themes and forms of the contemporary lifeworld. Central to their concerns is sculpture in its diverse manifestations, but also photography, whose trajectory toward its current worldwide status as a central mode of visual art was launched here in Düsseldorf.