The War After the War

In memory of the internationally renowned artist Gerd Winner (1936–2026), the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum presents for the first time, starting September 19, 2026, a series of previously unpublished India ink drawings from his student years. These early works bear witness to a formative creative period in the artist's life, while simultaneously revealing the profound scars left by his experiences during World War II.
 

To Gerd Winner, these ink drawings resonated far beyond the time of their creation as "visions of the apocalypse": "At eight years old, I experienced my hometown of Braunschweig in the fiery nights of October 1944, evacuated to stay with my godparents at the freight depot in Ehmen. On foot, I set out with my godfather for Braunschweig to look for my parents. The journey through the burning city of ruins resembled Dante's 'Inferno.' The images of that path return to this day. Shortly after completing my Abitur, I was admitted to the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin. The frontline city of the Cold War confronted me with the visible drama of World War II.
 

My pictures depicted firewall ruins, rubble, and torsos. The traces of wartime events returned, including in the 1957 ink drawings entitled ‘Der Krieg nach dem Krieg’. 'Der Krieg nach dem Krieg' offered a way, through drawing, to interpret both present and past. Only gradually did we learn the full horror that we had witnessed firsthand as children and adolescents without understanding it. Questions stood in the way, with interpretations that prompted further questions in search of meaning behind the reality we had experienced.
 

The search for traces of my own path began in Berlin with back-projections and hope for the city's future. Only the subconscious and unplanned retreat from the drama of urban cultures reinforced my return to drawing. The drama of the concentration camp, made tangible through my artistic engagement with Bergen-Belsen [Haus der Stille, 2000], led to a retreat into the inner worlds of the Passion. In these drawings, I do not even attempt to transpose the subject of war into an artistic focus. They were deeply personal records of human suffering projected onto the Passion of Christ, as well as of my own unresolved experiences."
 

Gerd Winner was born in Braunschweig and lived in Liebenburg. Through his many years as professor of painting and graphic arts at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, he influenced generations of young artists. Numerous art prizes honor his artistic career, and his works are represented in many renowned collections, including the Albertina in Vienna, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in München, the Tate Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
 

The Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum feels connected to Gerd Winner in a special way: a substantial body of work in the collection as well as major joint exhibitions, including in 1972, 2012, and 2021, bear witness to this relationship.