Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, born in 1880 in Aschaffenburg, Germany, studied architecture in Dresden and, together with his friends Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, founded the artists' association Die Brücke. After his move to Berlin in 1911, Kirchner went through an intensive creative phase in which his expressive works increasingly break away from the Brücke style. After his involuntary training as a soldier, Kirchner collapsed in 1915; he then went to hospital in Königstein im Taunus, Kreuzlingen on Lake Constance and finally from 1917 in Davos, where he continued his extensive work. Especially the overwhelming impression of the Alps, but also farmers at work and visionary landscapes became the central theme of his work. Kirchner's extensive work includes paintings, drawings and graphics, as well as furniture and free sculptural works. In the course of the defamation as "entartete Kunst" by the National Socialists, 639 of his works were removed from museums and partially destroyed. Finally, in June 1938, the artist took his own life.
Kirchner's works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, among others in the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Kunsthalle Mannheim, in the 16th exhibition of the Deutscher Künstlerbund in the Alte Kunsthalle Hamburg, retrospective exhibitions in the Kunsthalle Bern, the Nationalgalerie Berlin, the Haus der Kunst München, the Museum Ludwig Köln, the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. The Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Foundation also runs a permanent private museum in Davos, which is dedicated to the creative period from 1904 to 1938.