Ernst Ludwig Kirchner reinvents himself

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner reinvents himself. The move to the ‘New Style’ in the middle of the Davos years Galerie Henze & Ketterer Wichtrach/Bern 21.10.2025 – 30.10.2026 curated by Alexandra Henze The exhibition is devoted to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s works from the so-called ‘New Style’ – a creative phase that the artist developed from the mid-1920s and continued into the mid-1930s. Spread across two floors, a striking display of works unfolds: selected paintings on the ground floor and works on paper in the lower floor make the characteristic features, developments and particularities of this ‘New Style’ easy to follow. The aim is to give this phase the place it deserves within Kirchner’s oeuvre. With this exhibition, our gallery also contributes to the currently intense debate surrounding Kirchner’s work and the New Style – as is also evident in the current presentations at the Kunst Museum Bern (Kirchner x Kirchner), the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in Münster (Kirchner und Picasso), the Kunsthalle Mannheim (Kirchner, Lehmbruck, Nolde) and the Kirchner Museum Davos. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner came to Davos for the first time in 1917 for health reasons and found his new source of inspiration in the mountains around the alpine town. He brought stylistic features from his Berlin period with him and reinterpreted them, creating masterpieces of landscape depiction in his typically nervous painting style, with angular hatching and pronounced colour contrasts. The Berlin cocottes that enlivened his famous street scenes slipped into the roles of mountain farm women, while the Berlin suitors became farmers at work. After Giovanni Giacometti, Giovanni Segantini and Ferdinand Hodler, the city painter developed into one of the most important interpreters of alpine views: mountains, farmers and cows were sublimated in his works into central, celebrated and superbly staged motifs. The peace and seclusion Kirchner found in and around Davos helped him to a new flowering of expressionist power with equal force and intensity. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner would not, however, have been a master of painting, drawing and printmaking, as well as sculpture and photography, had he not continued to develop and thus reworked the majesty of his early Davos period into a change of style, which led Kirchner to his ‘New Style’, which we wish to present in more detail in this exhibition. The artist had already lived for several years on the edge of the alpine town and had recorded his surroundings and life at altitude from every angle and in every facet when this stylistic shift took place in his painting: the areas of colour became calmer, more homogeneous and were enclosed by intertwined lines, alternately concave and convex, so that broad rounded forms in strong colour contrasts alternated and produced a monumental painting. In terms of motifs, Kirchner remained true to himself throughout his life and, from his early beginnings in Dresden through the Berlin years, the early Davos period and the New Style to the late Davos period, repeatedly created bathers and nudes in studio settings or landscapes, circus or variety scenes, as well as sporting activities, often with horses, and still lifes of fruit and flowers or urban and mountain landscapes. So from the mid-1920s we encounter a Kirchner who reinvented himself completely and blossomed anew. Until the mid-1930s that followed, he created in this novel style, refined it and applied it imaginatively across all techniques. The exhibition, with 17 paintings – including some rarely shown works – and numerous works on paper, offers an impressive insight into the diversity of Kirchner’s motifs and techniques and brings his ‘New Style’ to life in all its facets. Strictly speaking, we cannot call this a late style, because the artist was in his mid-forties to mid-fifties, i.e. in the prime of his life, but also because right at the end Kirchner once again changed his artistic direction. While the works of the ‘New Style’ always begin with an impression of the senses, they nevertheless appear abstract, with objects simplified and shown from multiple perspectives; the very last works before his death were to become more naturalistic again. The ‘New Style’ can therefore be seen as a completed phase, which successfully demonstrates Kirchner’s drive to search for a very personal mode of expression. Kirchner searched for and found his language and style, which conveyed him without distortion and made him unique in the art world. Every work from this creative period has certain characteristics that unmistakably identify it as a masterpiece by the artist from this time. Alexandra Henze