„She is all art – Ida Kerkovius and the power of color“

As master student of Adolf Hölzels in Dachau and Stuttgart and later student at the Weimarer Bauhaus Ida Kerkovius (1879-1970) is considered one of the most important German artists of the 20th century.

As master student of Adolf Hölzels in Dachau and Stuttgart and later student at the Weimarer Bauhaus Ida Kerkovius (1879-1970) belongs to the extraordinary artists in Germany. Nevertheless the recognition of her work took place later. Until after the second World War she was only known to a minor circle of friendly artists such as Alexej von Jawlenski, Oskar Schlemmer or Willi Baumeister. With her first major exhibition in 1948, she was soon known to a wide public and was awarded the Federal cross of Merit by Theodor Heuss the president of the Federal Republic of Germany. Nowdays, named Kerko or Kevo by her friends she is considered one of the most important German artists of the 20th century.

Not only by painting, in which she expended the basic principles of the instructions of Adolf Hölzels the work of Ida Kerkovius is very expressive and various. Form 1920 to 1924 she intensely dealt with carpet weaving mill at the Weimar Bauhaus and her work evolved to an art form, which allowed her to have a financial income between 1933 to 1945. Form the middle of the fifties she also produced glass windows for differnet public buildings.

The heart of the exhibition „She is all art – Ida Kerkovius and the power of color“ is formed through/by her paintings, which does not contain artistic appearces such as artistic fashion-currents but shows differnent painterly attempts that exist next to each other. In Kerkovius art there are no developmental sequences of different forms of expressions, but since the 1930th there is a coexistence of impressionistic, expressionistic and, abstract pictorial language, of objective, non – objective or fantastical pictoral subjects. „I do not admit to any kind of art, but I always strive just as in the beginning of my development, to express my feelings which are within myself, to give them form, quality and expression, either in painting or in applied oeuvre“, she emphasized in 1949 and she pursues with this in spite of the extreme heterogony dealings with style of Hölzels paradigm of the ‚priority of the device‘.