Free guided tours at the Green Room
Special exhibition: “Signs & Wonders” Free guided tours at the Green Room Special exhibition: “Signs & Wonders”

Signs & Wonders – on faith, hope and doubt is the theme of the 4th Biennale of the Berliner Philharmoniker, which is embarking on a musical journey into the world of transcendence and worldviews. On this occasion, Deutsche Bank, as a long-standing partner of the Berliner Philharmoniker, is presenting works from the cycle “The Embrace of the Night” (1983) by Helmut Middendorf in the Green Room of the Philharmonie.

Helmut Middendorf is considered one of the most important representatives of German Neo-Expressionism. Born in 1953, he attended the Universität der Künste in Berlin from 1973 to 1979, graduating as a master student of Karl Horst Hödicke. In the late 1970s, he was a co-founder of the Galerie am Moritzplatz. Here, together with artists like Rainer Fetting, Salomé, and Bernd Zimmer, he formed a counter-movement to established art with a renewed figurative, expressive style of painting, which became known internationally under the term “Neue Wilde” (New Fauves). Today, Middendorf lives and works in Athens and Berlin.

The gouaches and watercolors from the corporate collection explore the motif of the night in the metropolis in various ways. They navigate the tension between belief and doubt, loneliness and longing. “Night” – for Middendorf, this is a trip through nocturnal West Berlin, an immersion in erotic encounters, the urban rhythm of the city that never sleeps. The night is also meant metaphorically, as a spiritual night, an expression of existential doubt, lostness, and the search for meaning. Middendorf’s gestural painting can be incredibly physical, but also express transcendence and a connection with the universe in a dramatic, almost baroque way.

Middendorf’s visual worlds move virtuosically between order and chaos. This is also evident in the large-format work “Himmel I” (Heaven I) (1986), which, with its raw expressiveness and radical painterly statements, captures the attitude to life of Punk and New Wave in the divided Berlin of the 1980s—a city shaped by subcultures, social upheavals, and the tensions of the Cold War.