Summer of '69

The exhibition is dedicated to the works of the painter and women's rights activist Berthe Lutgen, born in Esch-sur-Alzette in 1935, and the painter and serigraphist Michel Daleiden, born in Luxembourg in 1948, who lives and works in Düsseldorf under the artist's name "Misch Da Leiden". Daleiden joined the Luxembourg Art Working Group at the end of the 1960s, of which Lutgen was a co-founder. Together with other artists, they organised the spectacular "First non-affirmative cooperative exhibition of contemporary art" in 1969 and formed an informal group called Initiative 69. Until the early 1970s, Lutgen and Da Leiden were also connected through the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Politique (GRAP).

These initiatives by Luxembourg artists, now almost forgotten, were part of a global movement that contributed to the replacement of abstraction as the "world language of art". The unifying features of this movement were the creation of the most diverse forms of representational or object-like art: Pop Art, Op Art, Concept Art, Neo-Dada, Nouveau Realisme, Hard Edge, Land Art, Kinetics, Body Art or Happening. The 1960s were marked by a climate strongly favouring artistic experimentation. Artists worked in the spirit of an art freed from all fetters. In Luxembourg, the young generation sought to break free from the constraints of the École de Paris as the only representative current of contemporary art.

The show documents the artistic actions of the protest movement in Luxembourg, especially around and with Initiative 69, and at the same time provides an outlook: Based on selected works by Berthe Lutgen and Misch Da Leiden, it deals with two important actors of this movement and shows their artistic development until today. Lutgen and Da Leiden took different paths, both geographically and artistically. In various ways, however, they remained intertwined in their art with the subversive force of the '68s.

Exhibition playlist
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