Tilo Schulz: FORMSCHÖN

Demonized in the East as the “spawn of the bourgeoise” and “degenerate,” and celebrated in the West as the symbol of new freedom and the “pallbearer of ideology” in art, in the 1950s and 1960s Formalism represented a clear dividing line between the two political blocks. The political dualism of the post war years found its echo in the cultural policy of the time. The mutual anomosities between the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany came to exemplorize the separation between the Ostblock and the western allies. In his exhibition FORMSCHÖN, Tilo Schulz devotes himself to this phenomenon from the perspective of the here and now, in the hope of triggering a long overdue new interpretation of formalism since the collapse of the Ostbloc and highlighting its ideological conforms and oppositional roles in the West and East.