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until 31.08. | #3966ARTatBerlin | Galerie feinart berlin presents from 27. July 2023 the exhibition “World traveler, grande dame, painter (1901-1980)” mit drawings by the Africa and South America traveler and artist Lore Kegel from the 1960s to 1970s.
Lore Kegel was one of the first women to study at the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1919 to 1922. Living in Hamburg from the mid-1920s, the emancipated, adventurous woman made a lasting name for herself primarily as an art dealer and collector of non-European, especially African art — a passion that also deeply inspired her work as a painter and poet.
Lore Kegel, Unity of faith, pastel crayon, 1963 © feinartberlin
Lore Kegel’s life was marked by an inexhaustible curiosity for travels to foreign cultures, for their nature, people and crafts. As early as the early 1930s, she traveled to India, Tibet and Lapland, and after 1945 to Central Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and Egypt. Under the National Socialist government, she was excluded from the Reich Chamber of Culture because of her Jewish ancestors. During the war, she organized so-called „Kegel-Abende” in her house on the Eilenau until it was bombed in 1943, where artists, writers and humanities scholars regularly met. Important names of the art scene gathered around her, especially from the Hamburg Secession and with connections to the Berlin Brücke, including Friedrich Wield, Rolf Nesch, Emil Maetzel, and Richard Haizmann.
Lore Kegel, Idols under the roof of the hat, pastel crayon, © feinartberlin
The exhibition is dedicated to Lore Kegel as a painter and drawer. The lithographs, pastel and charcoal drawings on display date from 1962-72, an artistically productive period in which Kegel engaged not only with Central Africa (Congo, Gabon and Ecuador) but also with her travel impressions from South America (Machu Picchu, Andes, Bogota), Sri Lanka, India and Egypt (Abu Simbel).
Lore Kegel, The city on the equator, pastel crayon, 1962 © feinartberlin
The expressionist, sometimes cubist or even futurist gesture of her paintings is in the spirit of the manifold approaches to the renewal of art and society, as they spread at the beginning of the 20th century. At this time, many artists were looking for the exotic to break away from tradition and to offer the promise of originality and naturalness. Lore Kegel, too, derives from her encounters with non-European worlds an astonishing richness of themes, captured in vital colors and with a practiced, dynamic hand. Especially from the abstracting condensation of natural and architectural motifs, but also from the depiction of masks of indigenous peoples, speaks her sense for the forces of the irrational, the magical and the imagination, which come alive in the encounter with the foreign.
Lore Kegel, Flute players, pastel crayon, 1962 © feinartberlin
The convolute of drawings and lithographs by Lore Kegel is represented by the gallery in cooperation with the Hamburg collector couple Silke and Tim Tobeler, who administer the estate.
Opening: Thursday 27. July 2023, 6:00 to 9:00 pm | 7:00 pm Official introduction
Exhibition dates: Thursday , 27. July 2023 to Thursday, 31. August 2023
Finissage: Thursday, 31. August 2023, 6:00 to 9:00 pm
To the Gallery
Image caption title: Lore Kegel, Willow in the fog, pastel crayon, 1962 © feinartberlin
Exhibition Lore Kegel – Galerie feinart berlin | Zeitgenössische Kunst Berlin – Contemporary Art – Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
