The view of the landscape falls through the windscreen of a convertible.

The fields are empty, behind them rise mountains that look like canyons and are shrouded in fog.

The elements of this painting by Wolfgang Mattheuer might suggest that it was painted in the United States.

But the title "Straße nach Mylau II" underlines that this is not Nevada or Arizona, but in the Vogtland district, in the district of Chemnitz.

Kevin Hanschke

volunteer.

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In the first exhibitions of the "Minsk" in Potsdam, the new museum by Hasso Plattner, which is dedicated to the art of the GDR and its current references, these ambivalences are the focus of the program.

With the two opening shows "Wolfgang Mattheuer: The neighbor who wants to fly" and "Stan Douglas: Potsdam allotments", the Kunsthaus is dedicated to the subject of landscape painting and, a bit clichéd, to the allotment garden as a social place in the GDR.

The quite conventional approach is interesting, however, because the exhibitions focus on the transformation of the landscape of the GDR, which has turned its cities, coalfields and industry upside down since reunification.

Accordingly, the choice fell on Mattheuer, who was born in Reichenbach im Vogtland in 1927 and has always been regarded as a man of transitions in GDR art.

In the entrance area, visitors are first greeted by his landscape views, including the gloomy plein air "Erlenweiher bei Steinsdorf" from 1985 or his "Gartenbild" from 1960, an early summer work.

Particularly mysterious are his night pictures and the bizarre street views or his surreal scenes, such as "Friendly visit to the lignite mining area" from 1974, which shows the strange masked beings in an opencast mine.

The images are world landscapes and seemingly timeless, at the same time they show local phenomena and can be read politically - especially his depictions of Icarus.

In the GDR, and especially in its opposition, the mythological figure became a symbol of people's unbridled desire for freedom.

Icarus sometimes embodies departure and a thirst for adventure, sometimes human hubris and failure.

Mattheuer's works are also shaped by this dialectic and subtly reflect the contradictions of actually existing socialism.

"I'm looking for today's, the problematic, the essential," he said in 1973.

Icarus flies and falls

This is indicated, for example, in the eponymous main work "The neighbor who wants to fly" from 1984.

The sun sets over wooden dachas.

While some of the allotment gardeners have withdrawn into private life and are playing chess, others observe a mystical scene: Equipped with wings, a person in a costume flies over the allotment gardeners towards the horizon.

What he will find there is unclear.

All that is certain is his longing for freedom, which the picture expresses in 1984, a year before glasnost and perestroika.

It is closely intertwined with the biography of the artist.

A year before reunification, Mattheuer left the SED, which he had joined in 1958, with an open letter.

State security files show that he had been systematically spied on since the 1960s and was even classified as an enemy of the state in the final phase of the GDR.