Chaïm Soutine: Against The Current

Exhibition at K20, Düsseldorf, 2 September 2023 - 14 January 2024 ;
at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, 10 February - 16 June 2024 ;
at the Kunstmuseum, Bern, 16 August - 1 December 2024

Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943) was one of the great painters of early modernism. His expressive paintings shed light on his life as a Jewish émigré, and at the same time bear witness to an unstable existence on the fringes of society. With tumultuous brushstrokes, explosions of colour and distortions of form, he created declarations of love for life and for the most deprived members of society - an experience that Soutine was able to share through his own biography. Despite the recognition of his work, Soutine remained an outsider throughout his life, particularly to the social ways of his adopted country, France.

Through some sixty paintings, this exhibition catalogue deliberately focuses on the artist's early masterpieces, emphasising the various series created between 1918 and 1928. Under the general theme of emigration and uprooting, the contributions reveal traces of Soutine's Jewish origins in his work, illuminate the significance of his motifs on the margins of society and of blood and animal carcasses as metaphors, and show the influences of Soutine's art to the present day.