Hannah Höch at Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg

June 11–September 4, 2022

Hannah Höch is a world-renowned artist who has had numerous exhibitions but is still relatively unknown in her complete artistic range. Her work is still predominantly credited to the Dada movement, given her status as a Dada icon. This accomplished avant-garde artist’s oeuvre, however, is significantly more complicated and multidimensional.

Hannah Höch: Millions and Millions of Views examines the artist’s vast visual universe and portrays her as a relentless investigator and innovator of artistic expression.

Anna Therese Johanne Höch moved to Berlin from the quiet village of Gotha in Thuringia in 1912 to study at the Charlottenburg School of Arts and Crafts, then at the School of the Museum of Decorative Arts beginning in 1915. Höch travelled between the avant-garde circles of Expressionism, Dadaism, Abstraction, and Surrealism from then on. She puts these impulses together into a tumultuous and perplexing universe of imaginations. Surrealism joins hands with expressive handwriting, and craftsmanship joins hands with creative thoughts — a coordinate field of variants and cross-connections arises. Höch demonstrates that she is a capable proponent of avant-garde principles, since her study focuses on perceptual phenomena and thought forms, shifts in perspective, space and its symbolic function, and the world from various perspectives.

Höch initially showed with the Berlin Dada in 1918, and then with the November Group from 1920 onward. She had a close acquaintance with Kurt Schwitters and kept in touch with members of the Dutch group De Stijl as well as Bauhaus members. Höch’s paintings was deemed “degenerate” during the National Socialist era, and she spent the war years mostly in her Berlin-Heiligensee home. The artist took part in a number of national and international shows, including one at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, beginning in the 1950s.

Her collages and paintings from the Dada period have always received the most attention. Her diverse body of art, which includes various paintings, drawings, and watercolors, has often gone unrecognized. The Würzburg Museum im Kulturspeicher is now focused on this aspect of her work as well. Höch believes that the objective of art is to provide “millions and millions of views,” which she humorously juggles and depicts in her work, therefore finding her own stance in the middle. Her work is represented in all of its diversity with over 100 works, including drawings, prints, collages, and paintings, spanning all creative areas and periods.

Dr. Ellen Maurer Zilioli is the curator of the show. Wienand Verlag has published an extensive catalog.

In cooperation with Bröhan Museum, Berlin.

Events, digital content, guided tours and workshops at kulturspeicher.de.