In connection with the Berlin Festival and the Kunstherbst in Berlin, the Berlin cultural scene is focusing on eastern Europe this year. With its large retrospective exhibition of the painters’ collective Irwin, Künstlerhaus Bethanien is showing one of the most interesting standpoints of Slovenian art, and at the same time one that has been least shown in Germany to date.

Irwin does not only stand for a highly contentious debate with the historical experiences, myths and claims to meaning throughout art history. Irwin is also an embodiment of the “retroprinciple”, a process of montage that plunders the store of material contained in 19th and 20th century western and eastern European art, and – in particular – combines motifs from the art of the totalitarian systems with those of the great avant-garde movements. Thus a fictive “eastern modernism” is presented within Irwin’s ponderous framework, a modernism whose synthetically constructed interfaces question the schemata of western art history.

Curator (Irwin: Retroprincip): Inke Arns, Berlin.
Curator (Irwin Icons): Gregor Podnar, Ljublijana.