Sascha Repeated's life's work spans six years and an epilogue.

In 1924, at the age of twenty-two, Wiederd left Düsseldorf for Berlin to study painting.

In July he was expelled from the art academy because he spent the night in an empty official apartment, but just a year later he had his first solo exhibition in Herwarth Walden's Sturm Gallery on Potsdamer Strasse.

In the autumn of 1927, his paintings were hanging next to those of other Sturm artists in New York, and there were also exhibitions in Magdeburg and again in Berlin.

In 1929, Wiederd went to the Stadttheater in East Prussian Tilsit as chief set designer.

The following year he loses his job and returns to the capital penniless.

No paintings by him date after 1930, the last surviving is a poster design for a costume ball that Walden put on,

to save his gallery from bankruptcy.

The ball becomes a failure.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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And repeat withdraws.

The Nazis come to power, repeat becomes invisible.

He lost track of him for five years, then he began training as a bookseller's clerk in a bookshop on Bayerischer Platz that had just been aryanized.

At the beginning of the war he joined the management team, in the final phase of the war he was drafted and taken prisoner by the British.

There, in the camp, he paints figurines on paper again with colored pencils and pencils: female figures made of blue, red, yellow and black, dotted and monochrome surfaces, dancers with cylindrical heads and stockinged legs, fantasy creatures from an orderly world.

After Repeatd's release, the series ends.

In 1951 he opened his own bookshop and died of a heart condition in 1962.

Shortly before his death, a report about him appeared in a Berlin newspaper.

He was, it says, "a modest, forgotten painter of the 1920s".

The exhibition in the New National Gallery at the Kulturforum is the second rediscovery of the painter Sascha Wiederd.

The first took place almost fifty years ago in the Kunstamt Wedding, and the list of works on which the curator Dieter Scholz was able to base his new presentation in the Mies van der Rohe building also dates from that time.

But the show in Wedding had no consequences, and the painter was forgotten by the art world.

Only the opening of the Mies building after six years of renovation in the summer of 2021 brought the name Wiederd back into public awareness.

His large format "Archers" from 1928 has been hanging to the left of the entrance to the new main exhibition "The Art of Society" ever since. At first glance, the painting shows a multicolored luminous puzzle of geometric shapes.

If you look closer, you can see four riders on horses aiming their arrows at a wounded animal lying on the ground.

But the recognition is not limited to finding the motif, it also includes the semicircular shape of the arches, which multiplies in the surface of the picture, and the bodies of the horses, which seem to have frozen into circular and rectangular patterns in the midst of a panicked gallop.

Everything is ornament in this scene, and at the same time everything points beyond the ornament.

The violence radiating from the picture cannot be separated from its playfulness.

It does not abstract from reality,

but realizes the abstraction.

Therefore, in contrast to his role models Rodtschenko and Kandinsky, Repeated did not place any loose structures in the room, but meticulously painted every square centimeter of paper with oil, tempera and golden bronze.

His art is seamless, his space without depth.

But in the shallows of the rooms you can feel the unrest of the time.