Portfolio

Grafik des kapitalistischen Realismus

1967

EB25

Canvas box with screen prints by KP Brehmer, K.H. Hödicke, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Wolf Vostell
86 x 61 x 2.5 cm

Edition of 80, all sheets signed and numbered

out of stock

Front sheet designed by René Block in the style of an advertisement from the 1960s. Dark brown on beige cardboard. A drawing showing a man in a suit in an old-fashioned, luxurious living room. Underneath it says: By a master's hand ... Graphics of Capitalist Realism. Berlin 1968 René Block im stolpeverlag, and a longer text.

Edition by KP Brehmer. Imitates an advertising display. In the upper half, a pinup girl against a yellow background, pulling on a cigar. At the top left it says: THE FEELING BETWEEN FINGERTIPS. Four seed bags of different vegetables are mounted in the lower half.

Screen print on plexiglass by KH Hödicke. Bright red. A vertical stripe on the left-hand side in darker red in the width of a similarly printed window wiper, as if the wiper had wiped the surface.

Screen print by Konrad Lueg. 6 rows, each with 6 drawn babies with different gestures and facial expressions on a light background

Screen print by Sigmar Polke. A modern detached house in b/w in the style of an advertising brochure, printed in a coarse grid. In the foreground, a colorized flower entwines itself through the picture.

Screen print by Gerhard Richter. A blurred sepia photograph in the center of the sheet shows Richter and Sigmar Polke lying covered in hotel beds from above. Below the photo is written: Saturday, Oct. 14, 1967, between 11 a.m. and 12 noon (Antwerp, Hotel Diana; Polke on the right, Richter on the left)

Screen print by Wolf Vostell shows the German Starfighter Squadron in gray and black in a line grid. The fighter planes stand next to each other in a row. A band of silver glitter is applied to each aircraft

The large-format portfolio Grafik des Kapitalistischen Realismus with six screen prints by Klaus Peter Brehmer, Karl Horst Hödicke, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter and Wolf Vostell and an offset print by René Block was published by Stolpe Verlag in Berlin in 1967. The edition is initially published in a hard foam cassette (polystyrene), but this proves to be impractical and is replaced by a cassette made of gray cardboard. From 1970 onwards, a higher-quality edition was also produced in a green linen cassette.
René Block designed the front sheet “Von Meisterhand …” for the portfolio. In an ironic revision of a well-known brandy advertisement from the 1960s, which referred to tradition and quality in an old-fashioned way, the revised advertising text of the preface graphic shows proven “connoisseurship” in the appreciation of this Grafik des Kapitalistischen Realismus.
Block already used the term “Capitalist Realism” for his first exhibition Neodada, Pop, Decollage, Kapitalistischer Realismus at the newly founded gallery in the fall of 1964, in which the artists represented in the print portfolio took part. In the previous year, Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg had participated for their action Leben mit Pop. Eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus at the Berges furniture store in Düsseldorf. In its use by Galerie Block, it was expanded in terms of content and, in the constellation with Neodada, Pop Art and Décollage, established the aesthetic program of the early gallery period. “I was fascinated by the ability of these artists,” Block wrote a few years later, ”to be able to incorporate the subject’s reality and surroundings, everyday political life, the social situation and with it the criticism of it (yes and no) into the depiction.”¹
In the program of Galerie Block, “Capitalist Realism” is to be understood as the manifest positioning of a younger generation of German artists vis-à-vis American Pop Art, even though their approaches of making consumer society, the everyday and the trivial as well as the mass media dissemination of images the starting point for an artistic examination of reality are certainly comparable, as is the interest in working with new reproduction techniques. Unlike American Pop Art, however, the German form of Capitalist Realism has, as Block notes, “more banal and petty models” and ironizes “the behaviour of German philistinism”.² Socio-political developments and recent history are reflected more directly.
The portfolio Grafik des Kapitalistischen Realismus, which was presented in January 1968 as part of the exhibition Multiplizierte Objekte und Grafik des Stolpeverlages at Galerie Block, was followed in 1971 by the publication Grafik des Kapitalistischen Realismus, which published the catalogs raisonnés of the print works of KP Brehmer, K.H. Hödicke, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter and Wolf Vostell (EB31).
Text: Birgit Eusterschulte