From 11 September 2025, the Haus am Lützowplatz will present the exhibition HERBST by the painter Ruprecht von Kaufmann. The show features new works as well as selected earlier pieces by the artist, addressing the themes of transience, change, and inner reflection. With a distinctive figurative style and multi-layered colour compositions, von Kaufmann invites the audience to immerse themselves in an atmospherically dense pictorial world.
Image avobe: Ruprecht von Kaufmann, Party – Triptychon, 2025, Öl, Collage (Mylar) und Draht auf Linoleum / oil, collage (Mylar) and wire on linoleum, 182 x 405 cm, Copyright the artist.
In this project, the artist links current social and political developments with those of the Weimar Republic around one hundred years ago. The parallels are numerous and often unsettling: in the 1920s, dissatisfaction with the political system grew, economic upheavals led to ideological radicalisation, hatred, and the persecution of dissenters.
Today, we are once again experiencing a period of profound upheaval—marked by an unending series of crises at the end of the fossil-fuel industrial age. Once again, democracy seems under threat: through the rise of right-wing populist forces and the growing danger of war in Europe. Against this backdrop, Ruprecht von Kaufmann has chosen Otto Dix (1891–1969) as an artistic reference point in order to explore how an artist today might visually capture the “dance of a society on the brink.”
What emerges is a panopticon of contemporary figures: punks who greet passers-by with contempt; aristocrats caught in the snares of their family history; elegantly dressed hipsters walking carelessly past a sleeping homeless man; rap stars whose obsession with success has become an impenetrable mask. They are all children of their time—and yet timeless in their doubts, joys, and longings, which they share with people from a century ago.
What is special about the collaboration between the artist and the art association is that Ruprecht von Kaufmann took several years to develop the exhibition from the ground up and tailor it precisely to the architectural features of the rooms. For example, the work Altbau-Idylle responds to the bay window of a Gründerzeit building: the five panels are exactly matched to its dimensions and are arranged in a semicircle in front of the windows. The illusionistically painted pictorial space also shows a bay window, in which a drugged couple lies on a mattress.
The titular painting Herbstabend—the largest work in the exhibition—was created especially for the wall in the entrance hall. From a bird’s-eye view, one looks down into the courtyard of a typical Berlin apartment building, as it would have existed a hundred years ago. The steep perspective can induce dizziness.
Ruprecht von Kaufmann was born in Munich in 1974 and has lived in Berlin since 2003. HERBST is the first major solo exhibition in a decade by this internationally successful artist in his adopted home city.
Curated by Dr Marc Wellmann, Artistic Director of the Haus am Lützowplatz (HaL).
Programme (in German)
Artist talk
Thursday, 11 September 2025, 3 pm
Ruprecht von Kaufmann in dialogue with Dr Marc Wellmann
(Special event as part of the Berlin Art Week 2025)
Reading and discussion
Thursday, 16 October 2025, 7 pm
Maximilian Steinbeis: Die verwundbare Demokratie. Strategien gegen die populistische Übernahme
Followed by a discussion with the author, co-moderated by lawyer Dr Ulrich Karpenstein
Artist talk
Thursday, 13 November 2025, 7 pm
Ruprecht von Kaufmann in dialogue with producer and documentary film director Nicola Graef
Reading and discussion
Wednesday, 10 December 2025, 7 pm
Jens Bisky: Die Entscheidung. Deutschland 1929 bis 1934
WHEN?
Opening: Wednesday, 10 September 2025, 7 pm
Exhibition period: Thursday, 11 September 2025 – Sunday, 4 January 2026
Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 11 am – 6 pm
WHERE?
Haus am Lützowplatz
Lützowplatz 9, 10785 Berlin
COST?
Free admission
