The Medium as Artist.

Supernatural beings dictate entire texts, voices from the beyond give commands to paint, spirits draw attention to themselves with knocking sounds and make mediums speak unknown languages. It was not only in the fine arts that occult practices, voices of supernatural beings and magic moments were often felt to be suspicious. For the first time, the exhibition The Message – The Medium as Artist presents the astonishing history of the impact of a largely unknown phenomenon in art from 1850 until the present day: the exhibition, curated by Claudia Dichter, Michael Krajewski and Susanne Zander, brings together paintings, drawings and automatic etchings by more than 25 artists. Moreover, with films, photographs and audio recordings, it traces a line from the earliest mediumistic works from the second half of the 19th century to the present.

Art works by mediums who were very famous in their day such as Hélène Smith (1861-1929), Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884), Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) and Augustin Lesage (1876-1954) are on exhibit, as well as the astonishing paintings of the  Swedish artist Hilma Af Klint (1862-1944), who developed almost in isolation early abstract compositions parallel to Wassily Kandinsky.

In 1933, the writer André Breton compared the inexplicable phenomena with the art of the surrealists in his detailed essay “The Automatic Message”. At the end of the 60s, the American Ted Serios took thought photographs (“thoughtographs”) in front of the running cameras of the broadcaster Sender Freies Berlin – Polaroid pictures and the film will be presented at the Art Museum of Bochum. About 40 ghost photographs from the famous archive of the Munich parapsychologist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862-1929) fixate the contact with the extrasensory in pictures; historical recordings of mediums make occult voices audible for the first time.

Today, pictures are still made under “supernatural influence”. Over half a million messages drawn by Vanda Vieira-Schmidt, who lives in Berlin, are stacked to form an installation that measures metres in height. The American Paul Laffoley (born in 1940) illustrates in his paintings fantastic theories of time travel, black holes and mathematical questions on the 4th and 5th dimension. Laffoley will travel to the exhibition from Boston, and at the opening on Saturday, February 16, at 6:30 p.m. he will hold a speech detailing his experience and his work.
There will be an opportunity to have an interview with him.

A book has been published for the exhibition: The Message - Kunst und Okkultimus / Art and Occultism, published by the Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne.

The volume is written in German and English, and contains numerous illustrations and essays by André Breton, Claudia Dichter, Andreas Fischer, Peter Gorsen, Thomas Knoefel, Michael Krajewski, Susanne Zander, as well as a foreword by Hans Günter Golinski and Sepp Hiekisch-Picard.