Exhibition opening on Sunday, November 20th from 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM with a lecture from Peter Herrmann at 5:00 PM.

The exhibition will run until January 21st, 2012.

For the first time, all 27 bronzes from the Paul Garn collection will be shown as a complete exhibition.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a 36-page brochure in A5 format. All the pieces can be viewed online exclusively at our website. High-resolution press photos are available on request.

The discovery of an old collection is a huge stroke of luck for a gallerist because the pieces with the highest value on the marketplace and in the academic discourse are those with provenance.

In 2007, we were offered works from a Dresden collection. After probing some of the bronzes and preparing expert thermoluminescence reports, we conducted further research and discovered two additional lineages of the descendants of Paul Garn. After long negotiation, we succeeded in acquiring the majority of their bronzes. The gallery now presents a selection of 27 pieces, all of which have something special about them and some of which could even be described as unparalleled. Some pose riddles; others are classics comparable to those shown in museums around the world.

Amongst them, a Marka mask that may very well be the oldest of its kind ever found; an Ife head whose quality can be matched only by those in the National Museum in Lagos or the British Museum in London; a one-of-a-kind mask from eastern Nigeria; and a figure that looks like Nok but comes from Mali that may very well be a stylistic bridge – of which we have documented so few in Africa.

For the fourth time in five years, we are addressing the topic of cast metals in an exhibition. Like almost nothing else, age determinations based on physical testing methods provide us with important reference points for establishing timelines in African history. What few Europeans realize is that it is now almost exclusively art that can provide us with reliable clues about African history. Sadly, the idea introduced by Friedrich Hegel that the African continent is historyless still thrives in the minds of most Europeans. Due partly to the break from an oral tradition towards a Western-style academic transmission of history, many Africans suffer from this external perception of a supposed lack of cultural past.

It was Peter Hermann who first performed a dating of Cameroonian bronzes in the 1990s. Back then, the entire global literature on Cameroon contained no age specifications. Today, it’s widely accepted that bronze casting arrived in the Grasfields some 300 hundred years ago in the course of a mass migration, a fact from which important art historical conclusions have been drawn.

The bronze culture of southern Nigeria is even more complex because it extends back at least to the seventh century. Here, too, the gallery established standards. Unusually for a gallery, we financed art historical research that took Nigerian viewpoints into account and found a way to communicate our findings that had broad public appeal. Encouraged by countless correspondences with scholars and collectors, we began to date pieces as older than they were being dated elsewhere in Europe and North America. Today, in 2011, the African theses espoused by Peter Hermann have been widely accepted.

By means of an exportation for exhibition in the United States and a re-importation to Germany, we helped establish legal security for the trade. We devoted our energies to Nigerian reclamation and were, to that end, in close contact with Nigerian scholars. After years of addressing these and similar issues, we are now considered one of the preeminent galleries with a focus on art history and a commitment to in-depth examination of African art.

We’ve also focused our energies, if slightly less exhaustively, on Mali, whose wooden sculptures, architecture and terracotta excavations are better known to the public than the bronzes. Our collection spans the region with a mixed selection of pieces, including a well-known group of small riders. A 300-year-old casket lid, designed like the miniature of a granary door, is an enigma.

The bronzes of the Paul Garn collection were traded in Europe in the early 20th century, well before the conflict over copies and originals of imported objects darkened the mood of collectors and researches. Paul Garn was a vintner who travelled widely throughout France in the 1920s and, from what his descendants know, bought many items in the southern part of the country. Wooden objects from his collection were acquired by the Dresden Museum of Ethnology.

If our last exhibitions were marked by bold theories and the presentation of contested pieces that left much room for controversy, then this exhibition boasts a certain measure of calm. In order to enjoy that calm, we’re showing and publishing exclusively those works from the former Garn Collection. The pieces speak for themselves – for a century-old collecting tradition, for the long history of sub-Saharan Africa and its most impressive cultural output.

Paul Garn Collection

Auction Results
Christie's, Sotheby's, Hotel Drouot, Koller.

For 23 years, Galerie Peter Herrmann has provided artists with African roots a platform through which to build a global network. Trade show appearances and international collaborations along with five or six annual exhibitions in Berlin provide a cross-cultural context in which to discuss their multimedia works. As curator, Peter Herrmann has organized more than 300 exhibitions – in his own gallery space as well as in museums and at art associations – and has taken an active stand on cultural policy issues.

In 1995, the gallery became Germany’s first to have an Internet presence. With over three million unique visitors and 20 million page views since, the website has become an important source of information. We have sponsored the training of interns and the advanced training of scholarly personnel.

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Galerie Peter Herrmann
Potsdamer Straße 98A
10785 Berlin
00 49-30-88 62 58 46
info@galerie-herrmann.com
www.galerie-herrmann.com

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