Rolf Behm – ‘Colour, Form, Mythical Creatures’
The annual special exhibition of a private collection at art karlsruhe provides an in-depth insight into the passion and commitment of private collecting. Special exhibitions such as those of the Würth Collection (2017), Frieder Burda (2018), Peter C. Ruppert (2019), Hans-Peter Haas Foundation (2020) or the collection of Maria Lucia and Ingo Klöcker (2022), which deliberately explored the motif of the feminine in art. The complete history of the special exhibitions can be found
A curated special exhibition on private collecting
The special exhibition on private collecting focuses on the work of the internationally renowned artist Rolf Behm, who was born in Karlsruhe. Behm studied at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts (under Markus Lüpertz, among others) and lived in London, Florence, Berlin and Brazil, among other places.
Stefanie Patruno, director of the Kunstmuseum Karlsruhe (formerly the Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe), curates a tribute to an artist whose work is closely linked to Karlsruhe and the cultural network of south-western Germany. The presentation once again highlights how closely artists, collectors and institutions in the region are connected.
Rolf Behm's work tells of perception, memory and imagination with great colourfulness and openness. It shows how consistently an artistic signature can develop over decades.
The exhibition brings together around twenty works from different phases of his career: current works are displayed alongside pieces on loan from important private and public collections. In his work, Behm combines painterly abstraction with gestural condensation and pictorial narration. Figures, forms and structures develop in his series – for example in the ‘Chimeras’ or in ‘Malergepäck’ (Painter's Luggage), where travel scenes, myths and fragments of perception are translated into dense colour spaces.
The intense colour palette is striking: light-dark contrasts, pink next to green, transparent versus dense surfaces. Behm deliberately avoids black – and creates images in which the eye is constantly in motion.
The special exhibition is being realised in collaboration with the Berliner Volksbank Art Forum Foundation, whose ‘Berliner Volksbank Art Collection’ also includes Behm's works, which were most recently exhibited at the Kunstforum Wien.