MISSING. Franz Marc’s The Tower of Blue Horses Contemporary Artists in Search of a Lost Masterpiece

A collaborative project with Haus am Waldsee, Berlin

(3 March through 6 June 2017), with the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich

Scarcely any other masterpiece in the modernist tradition has as tumultuous a story as the painting ‘The Tower of Blue Horses’ (1913) by Franz Marc. Its alternating presence in Munich and Berlin made it a link between the two art capitals; repeatedly almost destroyed, saved, and preserved again, it ultimately vanished without a trace after the Second World War.

The question still remains: Where is ‘The Tower of Blue Horses’ today – as a painting, as a memory, as a remote totemic object? – a speculative question now posed by a group of contemporary artists in Berlin and Munich. Their works, created exclusively for this investigative exhibition project, examine the image’s mythology (not least against the background of the surviving Munich study) and trace the unbroken fascination it holds. The artists present their results in two parallel exhibitions in Berlin and Munich that function as an invitation to keep the discourse about the mystery of this iconic painting going.

Participating artists in Berlin: Martin Assig, Norbert Bisky, Birgit Brenner, Johanna Diehl, Marcel van Eeden, Julia Franck, Arturo Herrera, Via Lewandowsky, Rémy Markowitsch, Peter Rösel

Participating artists in Munich: Viktoria Binschtok, Tatjana Doll, Slawomir Elsner, Jana Gunstheimer, Thomas Kilpper, Dierk Schmidt

The Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam has confirmed that it will bring the exhibition to the Netherlands in the fall of 2017.