SUMMER BREAK

09.08.-04.09.2025

Günter Schöllkopf
(1935-1979)

Eccentric exegete of world literature & master of etching

Opening reception
Saturday 09.08. 18:00-21:00 | 19:00 Official welcome

The graphic work of Günter Schöllkopf, born in Stuttgart in 1935, leaves us with the impression of an inquisitive, political artist and thinker, gifted in etching and with a bubbling imagination. He received private tuition from Max Ackermann at the age of ten and completed his studies at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart at the age of 22. When he died at the age of 44, he left behind an oeuvre of around 1000 works, which deals with themes from world literature, music, history and politics. 

The exhibition includes works from the cycles On Balzac, Don Quixote, François Villon, ancient myths and fairy tales as well as three of his rare paintings. Behind the depiction of the themes to which the cycles are dedicated, a proliferating root system of references can be discovered that connects all the pictures, all the figures. Schöllkopf is not interested in confirming predetermined orders and interpretations, let alone illustrating them. Instead, in his kaleidoscopic, ambiguous pictorial worlds, he wanted to create collective links between statements that liberate thinking from pluses and minuses, from authorities and ideologies.

Schöllkopf created his early cycles, such as Zu Balzac and Ost-West, at the age of 17, when he was a young man full of energy, with a challenging spirit, rebelling against traditional structures and struggling with inner contradictions. He found his language in printmaking and drawing, using it to create a visual cosmos of his knowledge and thinking — especially in etching. "I am a man of metal," he wrote in his diaries (collection Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach).

Schöllkopf, an ironist and passionate poker player, had a sense for owls' mirrors, odysseys and fool's games, which bubble along in his prints in „intoxicating capers and, in his later work, pouring out into the broad and calmly flowing stream of his melancholy-cheerful, wistfully-ironic, logically-enigmatic pictures regarding to the lives of famous men and women. Taken together, all the individual works illustrate Schöllkopf's cultural analysis and cultural disruption. His stories from history turn the usual ways of seeing and thinking upside down (idealism), on their feet (materialism) and on the self (desire economy)."[1]

„I am a citoyen, I struggle through, I eat and drink, I fly and want everything.“ (Schöllkopf 1978)

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[1] Rudolf Greiner, in: Günter Schöllkopf. Werkverzeichnis, edited by R. Greiner and Hellmuth Müller, Verlag Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart 1981, S.11f.