Figur mit Vogel I

Before he abandoned painting in 1966, Eugen Schönebeck reimagined the communicative possibilities of figuration in the aftermath of the Second World War. Trained as a Socialist Realist mural painter in East Berlin, in 1955–57 he studied in West Berlin under prominent abstract painters Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn. He subsequently developed a style of figuration that balanced the comic and the tragic, inspired by the works of Francis Bacon and Jean Fautrier. Alongside his collaborator Georg Baselitz, with whom he exhibited and wrote two manifestoes, Schönebeck pursued an art attuned to the impact of physical and moral trauma.

Figure with Bird I marks Schönebeck’s transition away from the fleshy violence and Surrealistic nihilism of his 1962–63 paintings. If he previously sought to represent catastrophe, Figure with Bird I began to ask what it might mean to reconstruct the human subject in its wake. Here, a pigeon-like bird perches on the left shoulder of a nude figure whose arm extends down to a white plane that may represent a canvas or sheet of paper, as if the figure is an artist in the act of creation. An allegory of painting, Figure with Bird I philosophically probes the conditions of artistic possibility, questioning the status of creation and memory, during a historical moment when much of German society refused to engage with the recent Nazi past.