Berlin after Reunification

Berlin after Reunification 1989-1999

After the political change, I turned my focus on the process of change around the old / new center. The opening of the Wall on NOVEMBER 9TH, AT POTSDAMER PLATZ, the now accessible and empty area made possible previously unknown perspectives of the adjacent buildings. Soon the square became a large construction site that permanently changed its shape, the yellow sand broke up, a lake formed, construction cranes and scaffolding enlivened the square. I observed the relocation of entire sections of the facade of the ESPLANADE, the reconstruction of the REICHSTAG. Likewise Pariser Platz, facades were erected and torn down, scaffolding through which the wide sky fell, the reconstruction of the HOTEL ADLON and the spatial renovation processes of the historic city center of BERLIN MITTE. Although the encounters between people from East and West were in the foreground in the public eye, they are absent from these images. Rather, the events are reflected in the changing cityscape. The places became eloquent, the still visible old center of the east was interspersed with colorful signals, a new center was announced. Activity broke the melancholy.

Evelyn Kuwertz has chosen hard image edits, a kind of montage. She grasps structures, superimposes the sensual and the spiritual in her painterly perspective, and thus creates a painterly topography of the city enabling the momentary to be captured. She concentrates reality to an essence in her pictures, she absorbs and translates through a process of compression, thus creating a new and also sensual reality. Harsh, restrained and with sensitive seriousness, Evelyn Kuwertz reveals the interactions between architecture, people and society. She works against time and forgetfulness by painting the city in a state of flux, before it can close its ‘wounds’. Evelyn Kuwertz’s pictures show Berlin in transition. The changes are immense, and the pictures become contemporary witnesses – free of sentimentality, but nonetheless questioning. For me, her paintings express a mixture of amazement and also uncertainty and thus artistic doubt.

Ingeborg Ruthe, art critic, Berliner Zeitung

Museum Island and the New Museum

Mage motifs are the exterior views of the buildings from different urban development epochs that make up the historical MUSEUM ISLAND.

1997-1999 I concentre mostly on the NEUE MUSEUM. I prepare on-location sketches of the gutted remains of the inner spaces. The light floods the building storeys and structures the architecture and the supporting pillars with its shadows. A moment of calm – only the red scaffolding pointed to the coming construction work – in which faded beauty could be intuited and the destroyed sculptures can be imagined. The various rooms are depicted in a series of paintings and mixed techniques on paper, and the method of montage is used to intersperse the building’s current state with historical quotes, for instance the Greek Courtyard with the Schievelbein frieze.

Potsdam Perspectives by a Woman of Berlin: Evelyn Kuwertz in the Autumn Salon

The works by Evelyn Kuwertz, Berlin, are among the most interesting

Architecture, especially here in Potsdam, doesn’t only mean palaces and gardens but also many building styles and new buildings under construction. The past and present collide, but also enter into a symbiosis. Kuwertz’s pictures are powered by these transitions and fractures, by the contrasts. The artist’s background is in critical realism. But these works are not about precise, strict lines. Instead, a representationalism tending towards the abstract communicates the opposite through lines of a more flowing nature. Her startling compositions in impressive colouration – she calls them “Potsdam I-III” – are interpretations intended to provoke thought and interesting interactions, in which the viewer, through imaginative connections and the recognition effects, because co-creator of the pictures.

B.W., excerpt from the newspaper Potsdamer Stadtkurier, 1998