CCA Andratx Brings Contemporary Art from the National-Bank Collection of Germany to the Magical Villages of Mallorca

Mallorca, also called Majorca, is a popular travel destination in the Mediterranean. Known for its beautiful coastline, secluded coves, limestone mountains, and stunning beaches is also one of the most exciting places to see art.

Located in a beautiful natural surrounding, right at the foot of the Tramuntana, CCA Andratx is the largest and one of the best contemporary art spaces in Mallorca. Twenty years ago, the founders Patricia and Jacob Asbaek moved from Copenhagen to Mallorca and created the Centro Cultural Asbaek, an impressive 4,000 m2 modern building constructed from traditional Mallorcan marés stone. Conceived as a production place and dynamic platform for artists, it soon became a prestigious address for contemporary art lovers, offering a unique combination between the CCA Kunsthalle, CCA Gallery, and Artist-in-Residence Program.

Since 2001, the CCA Gallery exhibits the works of artists from all over the world, while more than 500 talents from 20 different countries, including Andrea Fraser, Saadane Afif, Gerold Miller, Ursula Reuter, Timo Nasseri or Michael Sailstorfer, have benefited from the art residency program.

This Autumn the CCA Kunsthalle presents an extraordinary exhibition organized by the Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur Bonn (Bonn Foundation for Art and Culture): Insights which includes about 90 works from the outstanding collection of the National-Bank of Germany, focusing primarily on the internationally famous Düsseldorf Art Academy, showcasing a selection of key artistic positions, such Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz, Katharina Grosse, Tony Cragg, Stephan Balkenhol, Cornelius Völker, Katharina Sieverding, Pia Fries, and Joseph Beuys (who taught over 300 students at the Academy), among others.

The central storyline of the exhibition unfolds through a diversity of artistic practices which can be understood by viewing the position of the works in the space. For example, Katharina Grosse’s painting hangs not far from her former professor Gotthard Graubner’s (1930 – 2013) work, known for his sense of pictorial, floating space, and abstract monochrome wall-mounted cushion paintings. These two abstract artists come from different generations, each adopting a very different artistic approach, but both being interlinked with each other.

On the other hand, visitors can experience a distinct way of looking at colour in the work of Cornelius Völker, whose focus falls on everyday objects such as handbags, flowers, clothing, bottles, or hands, playing between the representation and the represented viewed by the artist’s eye, revealing an exquisite demonstration of painting.

Among the works included in the exhibition, one can see Joseph Beuys’s lithographs. For Beuys, drawing was a direct medium of expression, in his own words the extension of a thought. As a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, he often focused exclusively on paper medium, and later he employed unconventional materials in his drawings such as fat, beeswax, chalk, and margarine. His graphic works can be considered his formative medium, in relation to his creation as a whole. Beuys regarded individual drawing as a means of personal exploration, but during the 1970s, he became preoccupied with multiple editions as it permitted him to spread ideas to a large public. The print medium offered him the opportunity to regenerate earlier works such as Spur I (Trace I) dating from 1974 and consisting of nine colour lithographs taken from oil and pencil drawings of previous decades with his signature motifs from the 1950s, the stag, and the bee. The lithographs reveal traces of the earlier works as literal reproductions.

The sculptor, action artist, draftsman, party founder, and university lecturer at the Düsseldorf Art Academy is one of the most controversial German artists of the postwar period. He inspired and influenced subsequent generations of his students to make art history, and their fame reverberates to this day, for instance, Imi Knoebel or Katharina Sieverding with works in the exhibition.

Imi Knoebel, already during his student days under Joseph Beuys, was preoccupied with finding new ways to investigate form and colour in space. He developed independently of his professor, in the legendary Room 19, along with his Düsseldorf Academy fellows Imi Giese, Blinky Palermo, and Katharina Sieverding, a minimalist or abstract concept of art. Knoebel was inspired by the theories of Kazimir Malevich and his influential Black Square (1915), which he subsequently took as the starting point for his abstract works. Knoebel’s body of work today, symbiotically unites with Malevich and Beuys in a single artistic identity.

The list of prestigious examples can continue, but it will be concluded with two other relevant names: Markus Lüpertz and Tony Cragg. Lüpertz is considered one of the most important German artists of the 20th century and after being appointed rector in 1988, he headed the Academy for two decades until the British sculptor Anthony Cragg took over his position in 2009, creating a new dynamic variety between disciplines.

This exhibition not only grants us Insights into the National Bank Collection of Germany, but also gives us a unique view of the history of the Düsseldorf Art Academy with works from different generations and diverse media, from painting, drawing to sculpture.