Paul Klee. Rare Fruits is an exhibition far removed from the usual clichés and fixed images. It presents gems culled from a limitless font of forms, shapes and designs that shed new light on Paul Klee’s oeuvre and his quest for deeply personal means of creative expression.
The exhibition is arranged in chronological order, its first part taking the visitor through a number of stations featuring Klee’s landscape painting. Creative problematics emerge from what are, at the outset, sensitive renditions of a nature vividly sensed. His marriage to Lily Stumpf and their move to Munich introduced a change in his life that was both geographical and personal. He now set about investigating his new urban environment.
In 1910 Klee’s adoption of the cubist-inspired dismantling of space into geometrical structures turned into abstraction. This found him entering a new realm of pictorial expression populated by imaginary figures and creatures. Standing in contrast with these flights of creative fancy, however, was the strictly formal approach that characterised the Bauhaus era. This presented Klee with boundaries for his representations of inner and outer spaces. In the years leading up to his death in 1940 Klee was able to draw quickly and spontaneously from a vast repertoire of forms, shapes and designs, which furnished him with a new relationship with time and allowed him to capture the essence of his pictures.