Sergiy Bratkov (born 1960) is known for his radically disturbing and shrill photographs, which, behind the beautiful, colourful surface, provide an unsparing report on the state of society.

Like other members of the "Kharkiv School of Photography", he has focussed on social photography for the past 30 years. In spring 2022, the Ukrainian, who has lived in Moscow since 2004, emigrated to Berlin. His reflections, which in his last series were primarily focussed on the outdated clichés of the Soviet era and the new habitus of power-grabbing Eastern capitalism in Ukraine, have now been brutally swept aside by current reality.

In the exhibition, Sergiy Bratkov is showing for the first time new image cycles and videos that were created from the time of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The ironically observant photographer has become an enquiring analyst whose new series seek to process the horrors of war in his former homeland without sinking into hopelessness.

Knotted together, intertwined, clasped - this is how Hans Hendrik Grimmling repeatedly depicts his subject, the human drama of existence, the struggle, the tragedy. It is the people who struggle with each other, who suffer, who despair and who draw hope that interest him. For Grimmling, art is not an accessory, but something universal, something urgently necessary. ‘It is the salvation of life,’ he says.

The exhibition explores the foundations of his painting, the origin of the painterly processes that create forms from colours and the power that is expressed in his pictures. Using only a few colours, mainly black, red, yellow and white, Grimmling's work moves between figurative representation and abstraction. The strong rhythm of the forms is constantly reassembled into typical motifs such as the head, hand, bird and knot, visualising the fragile side of humanity. At the same time, his pictures are refuges, moments of fixation.

Starting with some important early works by the painter from the beginning of the 1980s, the exhibition is dedicated to the artist's entire oeuvre in four large chapters. From the extensive work complex of Knots (1990s) and the group of works German Everyday Life (2007) to the paintings of the 2000s, which are strongly characterised by gestures, to the present day, it spans the arc from the early motifs to abstraction and the recurring bird and mask paintings of 2017-2024.

Hans-Hendrik Grimmling (*1947 in Zwenkau near Leipzig) was one of the initiators of the legendary “Erster Leipziger Herbstsalon” in 1984, an exhibition that is considered a milestone in the history of non-conformist GDR art. Grimmling left for West Berlin in 1986 in connection with the repression surrounding the ‘Herbstsalon’. From 2001, he taught there at the Technischen Kunsthochschule Berlin, from 2006 until his retirement in 2017 as professor emeritus.

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In the church, Leyla Yenirce stages her video and sound installation ‘Splitter’ larger than life, accompanied by urgent, harsh and tense sounds.

Leyla Yenirce, born in 1992 in Qubînê, lives and works in Berlin. The artist and musician works with painting, sculpture, video and performance to create multi-layered works that negotiate themes such as feminism, war, pop culture, genocide, desire, longing and irony.

Yenirce studied fine arts with Jutta Koether at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg until 2022. She has been awarded numerous prizes and scholarships, including the prestigious Ars Viva Prize in 2023. The Kunsthaus Hamburg dedicated her first solo exhibition to her in 2022. Her works have also been shown in numerous renowned institutions such as the Museum Folkwang, Essen (2024), the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2023), the gfzk, Leipzig (2023) and the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2021).

‘Leyla Yenirce. Splitter’ marks the start of a programmatic series at the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, which presents music and sound installations in the former monastery church.

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Sanja Iveković (born 1949 in Zagreb), Ulrike Rosenbach (born 1943 in Bad Salzdetfurth) and Gabriele Stötzer (born 1953 in Emleben) have taken radical artistic positions since the 1970s. Independently of each other, in the very different political contexts of their countries of origin, they developed a visual language that criticized common gender roles and the associated cultural norms.

The focus of their work is always the woman: for Rosenbach and Stötzer, the female body functions as a means of expression. They use it as a canvas or to break out of their boundaries through movement. Through her works, Iveković condemns the objectification of women's bodies and the associated projection surface for gender attributions.

The artists use a wide variety of media such as performance, photography, textiles, writing, painting and film to denounce gender assignments and counteract common images with their owns: sometimes loudly in large-scale actions, sometimes quietly in intimate moments, but always with a clear message.

Based on their own biographies, they create works in which they address the relationship between history and the present against the background of their female identity. To do this, they sometimes resort to rigorous artistic methods and demonstrate new possibilities of expression that have become groundbreaking for many areas of contemporary political art.

The exhibition presents photographs, video works, performances and installations from the beginning of the work of Ulrike Rosenbach, Gabriele Stötzer and Sanja Iveković as well as more recent works.

After initially working as a city planner in Berlin, Ulrich Wüst (*1949) was drawn to photography at the end of the 1970s. For him it becomes a means of subjective understanding about life in the former GDR. In photography he finds concentration and expression in order to bind his observations into the thoughts and emotions that trigger them.

Here he manages to precisely capture what everyday life drowns out. What is striking is the silence that surrounds all of his motifs, like the deserted streets in Magdeburg or Berlin. His motifs often appear as if they have been removed from the passage of time, destined to survive as photographs. The photographer's special sensitivity to contemporary historical processes and the changes that accompany them are expressed.

Born in Magdeburg, he developed a completely independent scenic view at an early age. Initially focused on personal documentation, he soon created a large number of his typical black-and-white photographs of streets and buildings with a generalized view of the city, its beauty and transience, its deformations and impositions.

Over the years, Ulrich Wüst also turns to the inventory that people hang on to, consisting of found objects or everyday images that he happens to come across. He is interested in interpreting the traces and signs of the past from today's perspective. Ulrich Wüst is obviously interested in concentrating the means of photography in the expression of these series, which leads to surprising narratives that oscillate somewhere between still life and abstract painting. From the 1990s onwards, a less well-known experimental tendency can be seen in Ulrich Wüst's work, which extends into the current picture themes.

With the selected series of images, the exhibition draws a wide arc through the extensive photographic work of Ulrich Wüst, winner of the 2021 Art Prize of the State of Saxony-Anhalt.

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House facades, street canyons, vehicles and pavements. Since the early 2000s, the Belgian artist Koen van den Broek has made the urban present the subject of his paintings. With ease, he moves along the borders of abstraction and depiction of reality.

His works show very unique excerpts from initially inconspicuous, deserted places: the addition of a few details turns abstract surfaces into magnificent streets; kerbstones and shadows become compositional pictorial means and generous monochrome use of colour direct the gaze of the viewers. Despite the absence of people, their presence can be felt in the works: circus tents, motorways, bridges, sewers, pipes, fragments of houses or cars. As if of their own accord, his paintings zoom in on these motifs, arrange and compose colours, light and shadows and lead the painter again and again to abstraction. Playfulness, diversity and duality - rigid demarcation versus wild brushstrokes, depth versus surface - are characteristic of his paintings.

The exhibition in the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg shows a cross-section of Koen van den Broek's paintings from 1998 to the present. For the first time, the painter's oeuvre can be seen in its entirety in a German art museum.

Koen van den Broek (*1973 in Bree, Belgium) first studied architecture and then painting at the Royal Academy of Antwerp and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Breda. His works are presented in solo and group exhibitions in Europe, North America and Asia and can be found in collections of among others the Astrup Fearnley Museet (Oslo), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SMAK (Gent) and Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp.

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A window overlooking pedestrian and vehicular traffic on a street corner. “Worst Case Scenario” consists of a collection of still images that show daily life on a Viennese street corner and only begin to move carefully as the scene progresses.