Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art

About the Presentation

Beck & Eggeling will present work by Emil Nolde, Hermann Max Pechstein, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Erich Heckel in a group presentation at Independent 20th Century. Few movements would prove more influential in the development of European Modernism than Die Brücke, founded in Dresden in 1905 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The young artists sought liberation both from academic rigidity and from the constraints of bourgeois society. In opposition to the conventions of Wilhelmine culture, they advocated an art of immediacy, subjective experience, and existential intensity. Rather than the disciplined study of nature, spontaneous sensation was to become the starting point of painting.

At the center of this presentation is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s monumental Totentanz der Mary Wigman, painted between 1926 and 1928. Inspired by the pioneering dancer and choreographer Mary Wigman, whose revolutionary conception of Ausdruckstanz transformed modern dance, the work is neither a portrait nor the depiction of a specific performance. Instead, Kirchner translates the experience of dance itself into visual form. Movement becomes structure, rhythm becomes composition, and the expressive potential of the human body unfolds through color, repetition and line. Rather than illustrating choreography, the painting reflects an artistic dialogue between two pioneers who, working in different disciplines, pursued remarkably similar questions about expression, movement and the human condition.

This presentation provides a focused perspective on one of the defining movements of twentieth-century art. Through paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, it demonstrates the extraordinary diversity that emerged from a shared search for new artistic expression. More than a century after Die Brücke was founded, these works continue to speak with remarkable clarity—not because they belong to a particular historical moment, but because they remind us that every generation must find its own visual language to understand and interpret the world around it.

About the Gallery
Beck & Eggeling has made a diverse contribution to cultural life for more than 30 years. A consistent, high-quality program with impressionist, expressionist, classical and postwar modernist works has allowed Beck & Eggeling to establish itself as one of the leading galleries in the international art market. At the same time, the gallery is committed to international contemporary art. Beck & Eggeling is currently staging exciting exhibitions at three extraordinary venues in Düsseldorf and Vienna. Furthermore, the gallery is represented at prestigious art fairs worldwide with this differentiated and ambitious offering. With well over 120 publications from their in-house art publishers, Beck & Eggeling facilitates new knowledge and enriches their exhibitions with their own texts as well as scholarly articles about art by prominent authors. Driven by curiosity and a love of art, Ute Eggeling and Michael Beck also carry out large-scale international projects outside their gallery space.

Dr. Ute Eggeling and Michael Beck founded their gallery in October 1994 in a Leipzig townhouse. The villa was transformed into an exhibition space for modern art of the masters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as contemporary artists. It also provided a forum for examining interdisciplinary art forms and exploring the affinities between visual arts and music. In 1998, Ute Eggeling and Michael Beck decided to close their Leipzig site and further pursue their international gallery program in Dusseldorf and New York. At the turn of the millennium, the gallery finally moved into its current premises in an eighteenth-century mansion in the heart of Düsseldorf's old town. In the spring of 2006 Beck & Eggeling opened its new quarters, additional premises directly opposite the existing gallery. The loft-like nature of this space, with its natural skylight, a former print studio, is ideal for the presentation of contemporary art. Since then Beck & Eggeling has offered a platform here for both established and younger artists.

Continuing to expand, Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art opened a branch in Vienna in September 2016. With salon-like rooms on the first floor of Margaretenstraße 5, the gallery owners are committed to international art dealing in particular and offer their customers another exciting cultural environment in addition to Düsseldorf. Another of the gallery’s predilections is the genre of sculpture, which is exhibited in large format in the private sculpture garden in Dortmund and can also be visited by appointment.

Michael Beck is a member of the Board of Directors of Fondazione Gabriele e Anna Braglia, Lugano, and Chairman of the Olaf Gulbransson Gesellschaft Tegernsee.