“Tremendous Power”, the new exhibition at Museum Villa Rot, presents selected exhibits from the FER Collection providing the opportunity to explore so-called ‘violent painting’ since the early 1980s.

Rediscovering their great desire to paint, the artists of that decade focus on sensual and passionate painting. Their most expressive works of art not only represent the socio-political trends of the time but also the individual freedom which the ‘young wild painters’ claimed for themselves.

The FER collection focuses on works by the ‘Mülheimer Freiheit’ group, who had come together in Cologne in 1980 with Hans Peter Adamski, Walter Dahn, Peter Bömmels, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Gerard Kever and Gerhard Naschberger and found an initial supporter in the local gallery owner Paul Maenz.

The group's artist name is derived from the studio address of a large backyard attic in Cologne-Mülheim Dahn and Dokoupil shared.

At the same time, among others Werner Büttner and Albert Oehlen appeared in public with so-called ‘Bad Paintings’ in Hamburg. And as early as 1977, painter and protagonist Rainer Fetting, and his ‘self-help gallery’ on Moritzplatz in Berlin caused a sensation with the new kind of painting.

The fact that this deliberately anti-academic and superficially amateurish painting soon found even international followers is documented by the work of the Swiss artist Martin Disler, whose work was driven by "an intoxicating restlessness and obsessive creative frenzy".

The music of those years, ‘Punk’ and ‘Neue Deutsche Welle’, had a significant influence on the "Junge Wilde", too. Film and sound recordings from the 1980s also dealing with the political and social situation at the time bring the explosive atmosphere of those years back to life in the exhibition. On display are works by Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, Werner Büttner, Walter Dahn, Martin Disler, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Rainer Fetting, Gerard Kever, Gerhard Naschberger and Albert Oehlen.