Collection: Art prints by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German painter, graphic artist and sculptor and is considered one of the most influential and radical figures of German Expressionism - an artist whose work expressed the tension between civilizational modernism and archaic originality, between urban alienation and natural liberation with an intensity and consistency that made him the central figure of the artists' group "Die Brücke" and one of the most influential German artists of the early 20th century. He was born in Aschaffenburg in 1880 and initially studied architecture in Dresden before finally turning to painting and founding Die Brücke in 1905 together with Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl - one of the most influential artist communities of German modernism, which programmatically turned against the academic conventions of its time and strove for a new, direct pictorial language liberated from all formal constraints.

Kirchner developed an obsessive fascination for the modern city and life in it early on. The streets, cafés, variety theaters and entertainment districts of Dresden and later Berlin became his most important motifs - not as the backdrop to a comfortable city life, but as the scene of a feverish existence permeated by desire, loneliness and nervous energy. His Berlin street scenes in particular, created between 1913 and 1915, are among the most impressive achievements of German Expressionism: slender, mask-like figures in sharp angles, aggressive color contrasts of green, orange and violet, torn pictorial spaces without depth of perspective - all of this is condensed into images of a modern hell that depict the alienation and hysteria of city life with a directness that is still shocking today.

From 1917 onwards, Kirchner's work changed fundamentally. A nervous breakdown, triggered by his traumatic military service in the First World War, forced him into a Swiss sanatorium and ultimately led to a permanent move to the mountains of Davos in Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life. This radical change of location left deep traces in his work: the urban nervousness was replaced by a new, calmer pictorial world of mountain landscapes, peasant scenes and alpine motifs, in which the color became freer and more two-dimensional and the form increasingly more decorative. These Davos years produced an extensive late oeuvre that was long underestimated, but is now considered an independent and important phase of his work.

In addition to his work as a painter, Kirchner was a passionate theorist and self-interpreter who commented on and constructed his own work with an intensity that occasionally turned into self-mythologizing. He wrote art criticism about his own works under a pseudonym, manipulated dates and cultivated a self-image as a lonely visionary, which still complicates and enriches the art-historical classification of his work today. The National Socialists defamed his work as "degenerate", confiscated hundreds of his paintings and destroyed some of them. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner took his own life in Davos in 1938. Today, he is considered one of the central figures of German and European modernism, whose works are represented in the world's most important museums and are highly valued on the international art market, while his Berlin street scenes are among the most enduring and disturbing icons of 20th century art history.