Contemporary Fine Arts is pleased to present For Christa, a tribute to the late Christa Dichgans comprised of a selection of her paintings and works on paper alongside contributions by Georg Baselitz, Gina Beavers, Almut Heise, K.H. Hödicke, Leiko Ikemura, Anne Neukamp, Maki Na Kamura, Ulrike Ottinger, A.R. Penck, Emily Mae Smith, and Bettina von Arnim.

For Christa traces affinities between Dichgans’ oeuvre and a constellation of friends, contemporaries and admirers, a gesture of appreciation for Christa Dichgans as a painter and a person.

The exhibition offers a glimpse into some of Dichgans’ most personal relationships, featuring portraits from the early 1960s she and K. H. Hödicke, her husband at the time, painted of each other, as well portraits exchanged with A.R. Penck in the 1980s. Georg Baselitz continues his Devotion series, working from an early self-portrait of Dichgans’ in his drawings created specifically for the exhibition. The interaction between these works is a window into close friendships between artists forged despite vastly different artistic expression and evolution.

Early works by her contemporaries Bettina von Arnim, Almut Heise and Ulrike Ottinger broach formal and thematic parallels with painters of the same generation. Though they did not know each other personally, these German women started working as artists in Berlin in the early 1960s. Hints of the social and artistic climate of the time are evident in the exchange between the works. Each draws upon a pop art aesthetic, despite divergent artistic ideologies at the time.

Gina Beavers, Leiko Ikemura, Maki Na Kamura, Anne Neukamp and Emily Mae Smith contribute largely new works to the exhibition, representing a younger generation of artists who are just beginning to discover and draw inspiration from Christa Dichgans’ work.


For Christa (ground floor)