As a member of the “Blue Rider” group, Gabriele Münter was not only an outstanding Expressionist painter, but was also among the most important Modernist female artistic personalities in Germany. In the year of Gabriele Münter’s 140th birthday, Galerie Thomas is dedicating an extensive exhibition to her.

Examples of Münter’s work from all periods will be on show, starting with the small-format landscapes, which she created between 1903 and 1906/07, still in a very Impressionist painting style, in Upper Bavaria, France and on her Tunisia journey, always accompanied by Wassily Kandinsky.

However, our exhibition will concentrate on paintings from the peak period of Expressionism and the Blue Rider, when Münter was working in Munich, often with the other representatives of the Blue Rider, and at the “Russian House” in Murnau, through to an example of her attempts at abstract painting, which she made under the influence of Kandinsky in the war year 1915 in Zurich.

From the 1920s, again in Murnau – with intermissions in Berlin and Paris – until her death in 1962, Gabriele Münter created an extensive oeuvre, which developed stylistically without losing its strong ties to Expressionism. Her landscapes and still lifes, which are represented in the exhibition from three decades of her later work, all show an unmistakeable reflection of the Blue Rider period. Her very individual visual language, characteristically combining expressiveness and colour, sensitively nuanced and with a classically influenced compositional tranquillity, can be wonderfully traced throughout the painter’s oeuvre in this presentation.

Galerie Thomas’s exhibition with works by Gabriele Münter takes place in parallel with a major overview show: “Gabriele Münter: Painting to the Point” in the Städtische Galerie in Lenbachhaus, so that there is ample opportunity available in Munich to rediscover a large range of the artist’s work in all its facets.