The exhibition assembles a remarkable selection of almost 160 drawings, watercolours and collages by the artist which are now exhibited for the first time after more than 25 years. These works, executed between 1945 and 1985, constitute a retrospective of Beuys’s work as a draughtsman. The drawings can be read much as one might discover the poetic magic of the dialogues of a wanderer between worlds bespeaking his conception of the spiritual as aesthetic.

Beuys’s bold motives of extraordinary formal majesty allows us to rediscover the inscriptions of an ancient mythological world, whose richness of meaning has all too often been arrogantly cast aside in the course of human history. The key words of these unique works are initiation and metamorphosis, voices of becoming and decay and the ›analogie universelle‹ of a universe of the senses, to which Joseph Beuys lent expression as did no other artist of the second half of the 20th century.

In February 2014 the exhibition will travel to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humblebæk, Denmark, and later to the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated comprehensive catalogue in German and English.

Gentiana blossom, watercolour on grey paper 29.3 x 21.1 cm / 115.4 x 83.1 in. [H x W]

Oil paint [Braunkreuz] on chamois-colored paper 61.1 x 43 cm / 24 x 16.9 in. [H x W]

Oil paint [Braunkreuz] on light brown printed paper 47 x 32 cm / 18.5 x 12.6 in. [H x W] 84.7 x 61.2 cm / 333.5 x 240.9 in. [H x W]