200 Years of the Present. Constellation 2: The Kunstverein and the Unresolved Problems of Civil Society

2027 marks the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Württembergischer Kunstverein (WKV). In the run-up to the bicentennial, the WKV is undertaking a two-year open process to explore three central ideas that are closely interwoven with the emergence of Kunstvereine (art associations) at the beginning of the 19th century from today's perspective: the constitution of the (white, male) citizen as sovereign; the freedom of art; and nation-building.

The founders of the WKV, including Gottlob Heinrich Rapp, Johann Friedrich Cotta, Gustav Schwab, and August Friedrich Köstlin, represented the newly emerging type of self-confident, educated, and wealthy citizen. This class rose socially by engaging in trade, holding political office, and supporting art and culture. Artists emancipated themselves from court patrons, although the new freedom of art was accompanied by restrictions imposed by censorship and dependence on new groups of buyers. Art associations, which now promoted “patriotic” art, classical music publishers such as Cotta'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, private collections of old German painting (e.g., the Boisserée brothers), fairy tales (e.g., the Brothers Grimm), and songs were central pillars in the identity-political process of nation-building in Germany.

The local characteristics and concrete developments of the WKV will be reflected in terms of their national and global entanglements. Linear concepts of time will be questioned. A series of exhibitions is planned that will reflect possible connections between the past, present, and future in four constellations. The four constellations are designed as open arrangements between exhibition, archive, and workshop. They are essentially characterized by searching, viewing, questioning, gaps, the unexpected, the provisional, and new questions.

Constellation 2: ... and the unresolved problems of bourgeois society
In the nearly 200 years since the WKV was founded, there have been numerous political, social, economic, technological, and cultural upheavals. The present day is marked by crises and complex conflicts arising from these developments. It is haunted by the ghosts of both the past and the future: colonialism, fascism, wars, authoritarianism, climate collapse, social injustice ... 

All these are issues that have affected the work and structures of the WKV in one form or another and will continue to do so. Constellation 2 of the 200-year project, conceived as an extension and recombination of the previous exhibition, starts from these aspects. Among other things, numerous new works by contemporary artists are on view.

Structure
The exhibition consists of three strands: an open sequence of image-text tableaux in which historical contexts and figures of the WKV are taken up and read across; a selection of editions, exhibition posters, and documents on recurring socio-political concerns of the WKV since 1946; and numerous works by contemporary artists that revolve around various aspects of the constitution of the citizen as sovereign — and its consequences. In addition, the exhibition includes a growing reference library with WKV catalogs, books on the city's history, and on the various themes of the project and their current urgency and areas of conflict.
 
Works by contemporary artists
Works by contemporary artists include video installations by Vika Kirchenbauer and José Alejandro Restrepo, which deal with the colonial entanglements of the European educated and propertied bourgeoisie. In her essayistic, performative video work Compassion and Inconvenience (2024), Kirchenbauer examines the classist, capitalist, and colonial origins of public European art institutions, using Great Britain as an example. 

In Quindío Pass II (1998), Restrepo traces the colonial structures and representations of European art and science history, drawing on figures such as Alexander von Humboldt and Christian Duttenhofer. The focus is on the figure of the indigenous porter who transports the colonial masters through the “wilderness”: a colonial allegory of powerlessness—and its potential reversibility. 

Restrepo's work is closely linked to the local history of Stuttgart: both Duttenhofer and Johann Friedrich Cotta, who published Humboldt's central writings, belonged to the city's cultural elite and were among the founding members of the WKV.

Lídia Chaves' wall engraving refers directly to Stuttgart's colonial history. Her new work is a further development of a public intervention that the artist realized in 2023 at the historic site of the 1928 Stuttgart Colonial Exhibition in the city park. Diagrams and statistics are central instruments of Western intellectual and scientific history that do not simply depict reality, but rather construct it. 

The 63 meanwhile iconic panels that W.E.B. Du Bois created for the 1900 World's Fair in Paris made the realities of African American life at that time accessible to a broad public for the first time, beyond racist attributions. At the same time, they overcame the representational conventions of European statistics and administrative graphics. 

Hank Willis Thomas' diagram Colonialism and Abstract Art—in critical appropriation of Alfred H. Barr's Cubism and Abstract Art (1936, Museum of Modern Art, New York)—reveals the complex geopolitical and economic interrelationships between modern art, capitalism, and colonialism.
The diagram developed by Yvonne P. Doderer as part of the exhibition 50 Years After 50 Years of the Bauhaus (2018, WKV) also overloads the functionality of classic scientific graphics with its complexity. The starting point here is the continuities of the Nazi regime visible in Stuttgart's urban structures.

In his AI-generated work Cancel Culture (2025), based on architectural data on the history of the WKV, Daniel García Andújar reveals the restrictions and stereotypes that continue to exist in technologies based on statistical evaluations.

The artist Walter Renz (1908–1998) also makes direct reference to Stuttgart in his works. His sober yet empathetic photographs, now on view for the first time since the 1980s, provide insights into urban situations in the city before and after the war. Frequent motifs include the Cannstatter Volksfest (fair) and the rubble after the Second World War. In the 1950s, Renz was a member of the WKV's artistic advisory board.

The painter Mina Gampel shows portraits of central figures in Stuttgart's economic, political, cultural, and Jewish life who are connected with the history of the WKV.
 
In 1982, Anna Oppermann presented a large-scale ensemble in the dome hall of the WKV that questioned the educated middle class's veneration of Goethe. The exhibition shows four photo canvases from this ensemble, which focus in particular on the German poet's relationship with women. Even during Goethe's lifetime, the Stuttgart artist Luise Duttenhofer commented on the cult surrounding him with an ironic silhouette. In other works on display, she critically examines the customs of the cultural elites of the time and their exclusion of women.

In his black-and-white photo series, Christoph Irrgang refers to a German monument that, alongside Goethe and Schiller, the Grimm brothers, and the Boisserée Collection, was central to the project of nation building in the 19th century: the Hermann’s Monument in the Teutoburg Forest.

Dan Perjovschi comments on nationalism, as currently being revived by a German party classified as “confirmed right-wing extremist” by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, in a series of drawings.

Further elements

Luise Duttenhofer is one of the central protagonists of the picture-text panels, alongside various founding and committee members of the WKV such as Gottlob Heinrich Rapp, Johann Friedrich Cotta, and Eduard Pfeiffer. These deal with questions about the constitution of the bourgeoisie; artistic freedom and censorship; and the WKV's links to colonialism and National Socialism. A section with posters and other documents is dedicated to Alice Widensohler: the first woman to head the WKV, who repositioned it after World War II and also shaped other local collections.

In view of the current controversies, during which the freedoms of art, science, and education are increasingly being restricted—rights that were only gradually emerging at the time the WKV was founded—an open, growing library has been set up for the exhibition. Its themes range from historical to contemporary areas of conflict. The modern concepts of freedom and autonomy, which have been continuously struggled for and reaffirmed across diverse contexts since the 19th century, should ensure that political and social debates in art and science, among other fields, can be conducted free from state censorship. Especially in times of global crisis, freedom of art, science, and expression should be recognized and strengthened by the state and politicians as central social goods. Instead, various Bundestag resolutions and arbitrary definitions of German Staatsräson aim to significantly curtail the right to freedom (and asylum). Forms of civil disobedience are increasingly being criminalized. With this library—despite and precisely because of its gaps—we want to provide impetus for open and future debates. In this context, various reading groups will be formed.