Tikimania: Bernd Zimmer, The Marquesas Islands and the European Dream of the South Pacific at Museum Fünf Kontinente
TIKIMANIA
Bernd Zimmer, The Marquesas Islands and the European Dream of the South Pacific
July 10, 2020 — February 28, 2021
Tikimania presents works by the painter Bernd Zimmer together with South Sea objects from the Museum Five Continents. This creates contrasts, harmonies and creates a completely new interaction between European art and oceanic culture.
Bernd Zimmer, born in Planegg near Munich in 1948, is one of the most important representatives of “violent painting”. In 1973 the publisher and book designer, philosopher and religious scholar moved to West Berlin, an ideal island environment for the flourishing scene of a painter movement later to be called "Junge Wilde". In 1977 he founded the "Galerie am Moritzplatz" in Kreuzberg with Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salomé and other artists. With great gestural vehemence and a strong sense of color, a new expressive painting developed. The artistic breakthrough came in 1980. The exhibition “Violent Painting” in Berlin's “Haus am Waldsee” made him internationally known and successful as a contemporary artist. Zimmer's landscape paintings were and are a result of his very specific ability to see and his extremely precise powers of observation. On many trips he developed, increased and perfected these talents.
In 1995 Bernd Zimmer traveled with the cargo ship to the Marquesas archipelago in the South Pacific, his powers of observation, his sensitivity to colors, light and cultural conditions. He did not watercolorize his impressions on site or sketch what he saw, but saved moving moods as souvenir pictures in order to implement them artistically after his return. One of his travel motifs was the myth of the South Pacific, the dream of ideal island landscapes and joyful, happy people. He set out to find places that had already inspired the painter Paul Gauguin or writers like Herman Melville in the Marquesas Islands.
The Polynesian expression "tiki" denotes a human-like shape, often with supernatural qualities. Tiki figures are mostly sculptures carved from wood, bone or tooth or carved from stone. The majority of Bernd Zimmer's works inspired by the Marquesas show (at least) one tiki.
The appeal of these impressive figures, which, with their distribution and strong presence, are among the most important and all-pervasive artistic expressions of the Marquesans, but also the western imaginations of the Marquesas Islands, which have been a common thread since the European "discovery" drawing the present gave the exhibition the tongue-in-cheek title "Tikimania". The example of Bernd Zimmer's works of art, the Marquesas objects from the Museum of the Five Continents collection and the creative new creations of American tiki pop show what a tiki can be.
In addition to the figurative character and materiality of the Tiki, it was (supposed) characteristics of Marquesan culture that stimulated Western ideas and fantasies and have continued to take up to this day in the form of a “mania” or obsession. Longings for the untouched paradise on the one hand and loathing for the supposed islands of the cannibals on the other hand had already moved Melville and Gauguin.
“Tikimania” traces the European reception and relates Bernd Zimmer's works to the history and culture of the Marquesas Islands and powerful Western fantasies. It is no coincidence that in 1912 Wassily Kandinsky depicted a richly carved stilt from the Marquesas in the Museum Five Continents in the famous almanac "The Blue Rider".
