Past exhibition

Once upon a time. Vill passiert sickher. Manfred Boecker, Rainer Gross, Wolfgang Niedecken

09.03.2025 – 18.05.2025

Manfred Boecker, Rainer Gross and Wolfgang Niedecken – the three musicians and artists met in the early 1970s while studying at the Cologne Werkschulen and founded an artist collective shortly afterwards. Like their peers, whose awareness was shaped by the 1968 movement, they too experienced a generational conflict and thus the unease with bourgeois society and the art world. Questions about the complexity of life and criticism of traditional conventions of society unite the three friends. They experimented with art and music, but their common artistic interest was, among other things, Dadaism, whose anti-artistic and anti-museum attitude could be found at that time in the artistic movements of Fluxus and the Happening.

The current exhibition focuses on the collaborative works of the three artists, which were created in the early years and which can always be understood as a reflex to the art market. Nothing is taken seriously, and yet many of their works are critical of the times and question the value of art with ironic commentaries and works of art. For example, Niedecken and Boecker develop the ideal images, jointly question “What is art?” or each paint a picture every day at the same time and create several monthly cycles. In this way they invent the so-called “daily images”. In these collaborative works they like to use riddles or word rhymes with ease and tongue-in-cheek irony. The painting “Once upon a time” by Rainer Gross also refers to the collaborative productions, to the deep friendship between the three.

From 1971 to 1974, Rainer Gross worked in Howard Kanovitz’s studio in Cologne, London and New York, and from 1974 to 1979 in New York with the artist Larry Rivers. While Wolfgang Niedecken and Manfred Boecker built up their music careers after their stay in the USA in the mid-1970s and took off with the rock band BAP, Rainer Gross continued to devote himself to painting in New York and developed a broad spectrum. The joint productive phase essentially spanned a decade, extending into the 1980s and then giving way to individual biographies.

The exhibition is created in collaboration with Manfred Boecker, Rainer Gross and Wolfgang Niedecken.