Opening: October 24 at 5 p.m.

With the exhibition project the Heidenheim Art Museum aims to highlight a number of current trends within contemporary painting.
The title quotes the phrase ‘It has to be like this!’, children often say when talking about a picture they have painted or drawn themselves. Even if the proportions are off, the perspectives are askew or there are physical anomalies, this phrase affirms that the finished work must look exactly as it does and no other way; that the freedom of painting and the imagination must not bow to the dictates of naturalism.

The Heidenheim Art Museum takes this childlike defiance as the starting point for a group exhibition featuring works by contemporary artists who engage either directly with childlike motifs, the typical painting style of children, or with the associated aesthetic of the imperfect and the spontaneous.
In the case of the latter, the act of painting itself takes centre stage: Brushstrokes remain visible, colours bleed into one another or drip onto the canvas; the brushwork is expressive and, due to the rapid application of paint, may be reminiscent of the ‘scribbles’ made by a child’s hand, although on closer inspection this initial impression is not borne out. In this respect, distant parallels can be drawn with the Fauvists or the CoBrA group, as well as with Bad Painting.
Since the exhibition curated by Marcia Tucker in 1978, this term has described the painterly appropriation of amateurish and unskilled techniques. At that time, the practice of deliberately painting poorly carried a meaning that was critical of art and institutions. Today, however, it can be a natural component of a pictorial practice that neither affirms nor negates perfection.

In terms of subject matter, too, the art does not indulge in heavy-handed allegories, but rather draws on either everyday life or figures, motifs, and themes from childhood. Two trends can be identified here: On the one hand, there are paintings that emphasize the cheerfulness of childlike motifs (animals, mythical creatures, the sun, stick figures). On the other hand, there are compositions that deliberately seek an intermediate realm between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Thus, it may happen that the casual tips into the uncanny, the cute becomes austere, or the banal develops a peculiar logic of its own. In the spirit of the uncanny, images emerge whose unsettling quality arises precisely from their proximity to the ordinary.

The subtitle ‘Latest Contemporary Painting’ [German: Neueste aktuelle Malerei] plays ironically on the art-historical phrase ‘New German Painting’ or other similar attempts to create art-historical categories, labels or styles. The Heidenheim exhibition responds to this with a touch of humour, as the adjective ‘new’ cannot be intensified. One might therefore ask whether, in the context of globalised art production, national stylistic concepts are not nonsensical per se, whether the art world’s constantly proclaimed superlatives are still relevant, and whether restrictive categories within painting are not, in any case, of little help.

The exhibition is therefore intended as a snapshot of various trends in painting, which at times share a kindred spirit or common stylistic interests, and which explicitly engage with the interplay between subject matter and style, between apparent naivety and painterly reflection, and between controlled composition and productive disorder.

Ultimately, the exhibition is primarily about the joy of seeing and the celebration of painting as a creative practice. For this reason, an extensive programme of accompanying events and educational activities has been planned, aimed at different age groups. Perhaps through hands-on activities, it will become clear that the notion of ‘I could do that too’ is not as straightforward as one might think, and that the childhood insistence of ‘It has to be like this!’ can once again help us to appreciate creative work. The works on display explore these themes and explicitly engage with the interplay of subject matter and style, of supposed naivety and painterly reflection, as well as of controlled composition and productive disorder.

Featuring works by, among others:
Katharina Arndt, André Butzer, Leandro Cultraro, Philip Emde, Andi Fischer, Gabrielle Graessle, Tom Gully, Georg Haberler, Björn Heyn, Olga Krykun,JiřiMayer, Adrian Mudder, Ximena Ferrer Pizarro