In its new presentation of the collection, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart establishes a dialogue between works from the private Scharpff-Striebich collection and works from its own stocks. Contemporary positions and works since the 1960s which gain a new topicality through the retrospective view, make clear the complexity and contradictory nature of our society. For some time now tense situations have characterised our everyday lives. From curfews and violence to the search for our own identity, we are constantly in the process of seeking re-orientation. Art symbolises the uncertainty and the instability which we experience on a daily basis. In addition to numerous illustrations of the works, the catalogue also includes short statements by the artists in which they comment on their works, thereby complementing their artistic oeuvre.

Text in German. Erdmut Bramke, who was born in 1940 in Kiel and died in 2002 in Stuttgart, is one of the few 20th-century artists whose work consistently expressed a purely painterly position. She worked only with colour and structures. The use of acrylic colours enabled her to create unique colour constellations. Her unusual palate of colours and novel shades of colour were a constant surprise. In her stylistic idiom she emphasised flowing lines, interspersed colour shadowing with linear structures and experimented with images produced by dip-ping the image body in colour and also by using different materials. Her works are represented in many public and private collections, including the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, the Ulmer Museum, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Bundeskunsthalle, also in Bonn, and the Kunsthalle Kiel. Erdmut Bramke studied painting from 1961 to 1967 at the academies in Berlin and Stuttgart. Her teachers were Heinz Troekes and K R H Sonderborg. Repeated study periods in France and Italy took her creative work into constantly new directions. Particularly important for her artistic development was the time she spent as a stipendiary fellow at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1979/80 and at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris in 1986. The present catalogue raisonne of the artists freelance work was commissioned by the Freunde der Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, as prescribed by the terms of the bequest of Erdmut Bramke her artistic design of buildings will follow in a later volume. Volume one is devoted to the paintings. It is introduced by essays of six people in her circle who focus on Bramkes importance for painting in the latter half of the 20th century. Volume two presents the sizable uvre of her works on paper, which must be accorded equal weight in the artists work. Reprinted in both volumes are contemporary texts from catalogues, newspaper articles and talks by Reinhard Doehl, Eugen Gomringer, Karin von Maur and others that show how the artists work was received during her lifetime. Until her retirement, Ulrike Gauss was the head of the Graphische Sammlung of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Susanne Groetz is a freelance art historian and exhibition curator, Carolin Joerg teaches artistic design at the Hochschule Augsburg.