Vorwaerts! - Berlin Exhibition On Socialism & Art Features Shepard Fairey

Online, May 7, 2010 (Newswire.com) - The artists participating in the Vorwaerts! group show stem from the Netherlands, the USA, both historical sides of Germany, former involuntarily communist country Estonia, and exiles from Peru and China.

Feat. Shepard Fairey, Gert-Jan Akerboom, Peeter Allik, Art-Erhaltung, Heimatlose Volkskunst, Musk Ming, Jurgen Wittdorf

About the artists:

Shepard Fairey manages a unique balance of the political, counter-cultural and commercial, freely bending and deconstructing the aesthetics of propaganda and liberation. His oeuvre amounts to a rich visual research into the history of ideology, either exposing its cynicism, or re-evaluating the validity of ideals along the way.

The masterful linocuts and paintings of Estonian artist Peeter Allik explore Europe's traditional values, murderous political history and not quite so innocent folklore.

Berlin-based Chinese artist Musk Ming's paintings and drawings cunningly appropriate a saccharine Maoist illustration style to unearth China's bountiful GLTBQ history.

The nationalist and totalitarian sites and symbols of commemoration are some of the more sinister objects and themes that inspire Dutch artist in Berlin Gert-Jan Akerboom's highly detailed ink drawings.

Within the confines of the early 1960s government-controlled art scene of the GDR, Jurgen Wittdorf was miraculously able to publicly develop a historically unique group of homoerotic socialist woodblock prints and linocuts, proving either the naivety or open-mindedness of the state patrons and audiences of the time.

The exiled South-American installation artist who has been working for nearly two decades under the label "Heimatlose Volkskunst," uses the civilisational waste (often of GDR origin) found in the streets and abandoned buildings of Berlin, fusing it with the relics and symbols of other ideologies and religions.

Art-Erhaltung is an agglomerate of creative minds keenly interested in presenting artworks with a conceptual and philanthropic outlook. They encourage a polemical and philosophical discourse that questions the art world's unwritten conventions.

Duration: May 1 - 27, 2010, Wed - Fr: 1 - 6 pm, Sa: 3-7 pm, Sun 2-6 pm.
Closing reception: Friday, May 28, 7-10 pm.

Kunstraum Richard Sorge, Old Brewery, Landsberger Alllee 54, 10249 Berlin