From October 15, 2021 to January 17, 2022, THE VERBORGENE MUSEUM will be a guest at the Berlinische Galerie and present the first retrospective of the sculptor Louise Stomps. With approximately 90 sculptures, the exhibition provides insight into the life's work of this extraordinary artist.

Human suffering and the defenceless creature were the inspiration for the Berlin sculptor Louise Stomps' (1900-1988) artistic creativity throughout her life. They are at the heart of her work, which was created between the fading 1920s and the late 1980s. For five decades, the sculptor completed the artistic process from the classical body image to highly abstracted figuration; in the process, she successively developed her significantly individual style.

Although Louise Stomps had been drawing and modelling intensively since 1918, it was not until ten years later, after her divorce from her husband, that she devoted herself entirely to the practice of art as the mother of two daughters. She was not discouraged by the widespread prejudice that women artists were better off in the arts and crafts, and between 1928 and 1932 she took part in the evening classes of the "Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Künste" (United State Schools for Liberal and Applied Arts) in Berlin; in addition, she trained with Milly Steger (1881-1948) in the sculpture class of the "Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen" (Association of Berlin Women Artists).

As a result of bombing raids on her studio during the Second World War, only a few of her works from the 1930s have survived, for example "Das Paar" ("The Couple") in oak (1937), a pair of lovers kneeling next to each other in a deep bond, still completely committed to the realistic image of man. These early beginnings of her artistic imagery could not be reconciled with the prevailing conception of art under National Socialism, so she withdrew into inner emigration.

In October 1945, Louise Stomps participated alongside Renée Sintenis, Hans Uhlmann, Gustav Seitz, Paul Dierkes and Karl Hartung, among others, in the first exhibition of "Sculpture and Sculpture Drawing" at the Galerie Gerd Rosen in Berlin at Kurfürstendamm 215.

After the shocks experienced in her own body during the Second World War, figural abstraction offered Louise Stomps, as it did for many of her colleagues, the only path to artistic form: From the 1950s onwards, she produced figures with threatening, dismissive or fear-provoking gestures such as "Mourners" (1951), "The Stranger" (1947), "Common Lament" (1948) or, in direct allusion to political events, "Hiroshima" (1960).

Louise Stomp's preference for wood as a material for her "Natur Gestalten" was presumably triggered by a turning point in her life when she moved from Berlin to the Bavarian town of Rechtmehring near Wasserburg in the Inn valley in 1960, where she lived in an old Kumpfmühle dating from the 15th century. Here she was inspired by nature as the original source of all living things, by the woods of beech, pine, oak, Inn oak, apple, acacia, nut, pear and many others, here she consistently developed her formal language of a so-called figural abstraction.

In the 1960s her slender figures, the "Asket" (1963) or the "Pilger" (1966) became three meters high and in 1980 she created "Gilgamesch" with a height of 3.20 meters, who, according to the legend, is one third human, two thirds divine, on his quest for immortality.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Hirmer Verlag, ed. by Marion Beckers and Elisabeth Moortgat for DAS VERBORGENE MUSEUM, with scholarly contributions by Yvette Deseyve, Arie Hartog, Annelie Lütgens, Christiane Meister, Christina Thürmer-Rohr, Julia Wallner, and personal recollections by Berthold Kogut, Martin Meggle, Peter Schrader, and Hans Goswin Stomps; illustrated with new photographs of the sculptures.

The exhibition and catalogue deal for the first time with the work of this extraordinary sculptress and place it in an international context.

The exhibition and catalogue are made possible by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.