Escape from Colditz - Annette & Erasmus Schröter at Luton Airport Departure Lounge
Opening Reception: Saturday January 22, 5-8 pm, Admission free, all welcome. Exclusive ‘in conversation’ event with Erasmus Schröter from 4pm prior to the opening
The Exhibition will be formally opened at 6.00pm by Cord Meier-Klodt Cultural attaché at the German Embassy, London
Artists Annette and Erasmus Schröter are based in Leipzig, South Eastern Germany close to the the town of Colditz, where the famous prison camp for allied officers was located. For its second exhibition Departure Lounge is delighted to welcome them to the UK to mount one of their bewitching shared exhibitons.
Both artists were born in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), and attended Leipzig’s internationally acclaimed Academy of Fine Arts – the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (or HGB). Political differences with East Germany’s Stalinist regime saw the Schroeters entering voluntary exile the West in 1985 only returning to Leipzig in 1997 following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Annette Schroeter has been professor of painting and graphics at the HGB since 2006.
An ambitious series of staged analogue photographs forms the core of the exhibition in which the artists - dressed as giant rabbits – bring a bizarre and slightly twisted flavour to the folk-tales, personal memories and urban myths that they grew up with.
Annette Schroeter - one of Germany’s highest regarded painters also produces giant paper-cuts. These radically modernise this traditional German craft skill by adjusting scale and including motifs like grafitti covered derelict buildings and war damage. A tapestry of objects and artworks from their past including socialist children’s toys, GDR postcards (their ‘holiday’ motifs served up with a with a particular ideological flavour) and home-made household decorations gives the exhibition a domestic feel, which points to the artists’ interest in the use of ornamentation pattern and colour as tools of ideological control.
Both artists’ work is marked by an intensive analysis of Germany’s post war and communist history. and their own place within it. Their work – which evidences their very traditional training and an enduring fascination for a western consumer culture that they first encountered in their late 20s, is unique in international contemporary art. The exhibition’s title Escape from Colditz is a reference to their own escape from the social and cultural paralysis of the GDR in the mid- 1980s, and their continuing efforts to digest this legacy in their artwork.
(Click on the header for more information and how to book tickets for this event)
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