Towards a logic of desire
Paul Ege discovered his passion for art at a young age. He bought his first painting as early as 1958 in Nuremberg, where he was completing his education as a businessman. The lithograph by Michael Mathias Prechtl, which shows an abstracted landscape, is still in the collection today. Over the decades, a heterogeneous collection developed, solely committed to personal taste and purchased for private use, ranging from expressionist prints to figurative paintings, assemblages and sculptures. Gradually, however, through acquisitions of works by Johannes Geccelli, Gotthard Graubner and others, a fundamental interest in contemporary abstract art began to emerge, which was not tied solely to the conditions of the representational world and which, in anticipation of the collection's subsequent focus, thematized color as a subject of painting, among other things.
From collecting to a collection
In the early 1990s, Paul Ege and his wife became acquainted with national and international painting positions attributed to Radical Painting through the Krohn Gallery in Badenweiler, not far from Freiburg. From then on, their enthusiasm was for color itself: Marcia Hafif, Phil Sims, Joseph Marioni, Peter Tollens, Rudolf de Crignis, Dieter Villinger and Günter Umberg have been represented in the focused collection ever since and represent the heart of the collection: paintings that operate in the tension between a material thing produced by a process and an aesthetic totality. While at the outset Paul Ege was less interested in the theoretical background of the works than their meditative nature, in retrospect it seems all the more fortunate that it was precisely the acute conceptual questioning of these paintings that offered the potential for a more focused evolution of the collection up to the present day.
From painting to image
In the course of the collection’s progressive expansion, the question posed by Radical Painting about the nature of painting was extended to the possibilities of the image. This simultaneously extended its relevance into the past as well as the present. Concurrently with this reduced style of painting, an interest in minimalist tendencies was emerging, prompting the addition of numerous works to the collection by, for example, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Fred Sandback, and even Sol LeWitt, who in the early 1960s defined fundamentally new definitions of the work of art in relation to both space and the viewer.
In parallel, the interest in works on paper, which had always existed, was further cultivated. In addition to various holdings by Richard Tuttle, Robert Ryman, or Agnes Martin, numerous works by Katharina Hinsberg, Frank Badur, and Thomas Müller were acquired—against the backdrop of an autonomous approach to drawing. Lastly, the collection was meaningfully expanded with photographs by Michael Reich, Jörg Sasse, and Axel Hütte for example, as well as video works by Dieter Kiessling, among others.
From surface to space
Both Radical Painting and Minimal Art, which allow for direct experience in space, were ultimately the basis for the collection’s opening of the image more and more to reality. While it had not only been two-dimensional works—but also sculptural and installation —that were understood as images, but the question of the relationship between image and space eventually led to a desire for a younger generation of artists to address the question of the image in today’s world. Installation works, such as those by Adrian Schiess, Freya Richter, or even Lori Hersberger, which are characteristic of an expanded concept of the image, show how image becomes space or space becomes image, and how ephemeral, pictorial statements lead to a critical, sometimes humorous examination of historical concepts of materiality and visuality.
The achievements of the “old masters” continue to have effects in the present, in the form of reflections, intellectual adjacencies, further developments, or even deliberate demarcation. Their redefinition of the relationship between material and form serves the younger generation—without ever culminating in pure formalism—as the basis for a forward-looking conception of the non-objective image. It is an image that is always in relation to the viewer’s gaze. Thus, ultimately, the focus of the collection also revolves around the space in which an image is viewed and contemplated, thus demonstrating the basic conditions of our perception in the first place. In this sense, we collect in order to see!
