Teacher, Pupil, Friend, Colleague
Ludwig Meidner and Jörg von Kitta-Kittel
paintings, drawings and photographs
August 14 until September 24, 2016
Galerie Netuschil
Schleiermacherstr. 8, 64283 Darmstadt
Ludwig Meidner fled to England from the National Socialists, where he suffered internment and a life of privation. Although the decision to return to Germany after the war was more than difficult for him as an observant Jew, he nevertheless experienced an artistically productive and happy period in Marxheim. The exhibition at Galerie Netuschil spanned an arc from the beginning of the last century to the present. On show were works by Ludwig Meidner ranging over almost six decades, from 1906 to his death in 1966, and works by his master pupil Jörg von Kitta-Kittel, dating from 1958 to today. The main emphasis of the exhibition was on paintings and drawings they did in their joint studio in Marxheim and in Darmstadt.
This productive phase in which they worked as a kind of team led to numerous mutual portraits and also landscapes and still lifes. Jörg von Kitta-Kittel started his artistic training at the age of 18 with the then 70-year-old Ludwig Meidner. Today von Kitta-Kittel, meantime 75 years of age himself, lives as a free-lance artist in Frankfurt am Main. Whereas the period in which they worked together was characterized by a tempered realism, the two artists created heightened-expressive pictorial worlds – Ludwig Meidner in his early phase and Jörg von Kitta-Kittel to this very day. The works by these two artists were accompanied by atmospheric studio photographs, mainly taken by Stefan Moses.
