When Albrecht Dürer crossed the Alps in 1507 on his way back from Venice, he was moved by their beauty and grandeur and captured the mountains in his first realistic portrayals as watercolors. However, Dürer is far ahead of its time – the landscape representation has still not established as an independent genre and is either completely absent in paintings or has an allegorical meaning as an idealized landscape. In this sense, the mountain symbolizes the difficult and hostile, but then to be conquered. In Romanticism (Caspar David Friedrich) in the 19th century, this “tremendum” is transformed into a sublime one: the landscape is deeply religious and spiritually charged. The mountain landscapes are no longer frightening, but mysterious and “sublime. ” The Expressionists use the mountain landscapes to dynamically bring the jagged peaks and gorges into the picture in flat brushstrokes.

The dramatic, unchangeable, sometimes threatening and yet always fascinating of the mountains has not only challenged climbers for several centuries, but also captivated artists. It is the diversity of this landscape, with its cliffs, cliffs, gorges, peaks, abysses, lakes and valleys, that makes it possible to take on picturesque challenges, whether in realistic representation or in the abstract. This exhibition “Mountains” brings together different contemporary positions that focus on the mountain as a special phenomenon in a wide variety of techniques and facets.