Exhibitions / Press

Between Worlds – Two Paths

Arie Hartog, Director of the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus | Pairing a sculptor with a painter, or a painter with a sculptor, is a common exhibition format in the art world and gallery scene. At the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus, we never do that. In the case of the exhibition featuring Frank Markowski and Siegfried Bank, we can therefore speak of a rare exception. But the painter and the sculptor were not simply thrown together; rather, they had discovered through shared experience that their works complement each other well, and they applied to hold an exhibition at the museum on the occasion of the 2025 Mensa conference in Bremen. Mensa is a network for the gifted, and the irony, of course, is that these are not automatically gifted artists, and that we viewers, conversely, notice while looking how much our perception is shaped by prior knowledge—such as their association with the organization—and thus we search for clues (which we do not find). Some visitors put it this way: they expected IQ and got emotion.

In the case of Banks’s paintings, the titles of his works contain the occasion that prompted them; for Markowski, titling is the final step in a process by which a successful work is named. This alone makes clear how fundamentally different their approaches are. And the art itself? Banks produces layered figurative paintings in which individual figures and relationships emerge during viewing, only to recede again into the painted whole. Markowski’s sculptures, by contrast, are compressed, non-representational forms that symbolize feelings or mental processes. There is a word that tends to be avoided in the art world, yet proves useful here: “conventional.” When artworks refer to conventions — as when Banks’s brushstrokes signal emotions, or the sweep of one of Markowski’s forms in space conveys an optimistic impulse — communication becomes possible. Especially in art that, in the broadest sense, aspires to carry or evoke feelings beyond the reach of language, every visible reference to shared human (visual) experience should be understood as a means to that end.

The exhibition and the interplay of works within the space pointed, however, toward a category beyond (artistic) disposition, content, or convention — one that is, unfortunately, rarely invoked today: expression. Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), the great German-Jewish philosopher, developed the idea of “expressive perception” as the most primary form of perception. Human beings sense an atmosphere through feeling, and only then does attentive perception of things follow. Put differently: the sensory experience of a situation comes first; meaning comes after. Visual art has the capacity to foreground precisely this sensory experience — to push all words to the back. In this exhibition, that experience was shaped by the contrast between the delicate tones within the room and the bold ones on the walls. The result was, quite literally, atmospheric intervals — charged in-between spaces through which visitors could move.

The exhibition brought together two artists who work with the expressive potential of their respective practices: Banks, animated by his subjects, shifts modes and pictorial forms with an ease that feels entirely natural, while Markowski has developed a visual language clearly defined through form and color. What was on view, then, was not simply a pairing of painter and sculptor, but an attempt to arrange different artistic attitudes and positions within a shared space — not merely to contrast them, but to make them mutually visible. Especially when visitors allowed themselves to respond to the atmospheric as a quality in its own right, something became perceptible beyond the subtle, dark undertone conveyed through color in Banks’s work and the more buoyant mood that pervades Markowski’s: a quality that might be called visual contemplation.