Piet Mondrian, the media star! The famous Dutch painter repeatedly called for art and life to be connected. In fact, his art has succeeded like no other in visually permeating many areas of life: From clothing, consumer items, and bags to entire façades of buildings. Who does not know it, the catchy and quickly recognizable design of everyday objects that uninhibitedly and bluntly make use of his ingenious compositions. It is also impossible to imagine social media without Piet Mondrian as an “influencer”: On the TikTok platform, the hashtag #mondrian currently registers no less than 26.4 million views.

Like hardly any other artist, Piet Mondrian managed within a few years to move away from figuration in the 1910s to establish a trend-setting abstract style of painting, which, in his extensive art-theoretical writings, he called “New Design” or “Neoplasticism.” The ostensibly simple compositions of initially black lines, colored squares and rectangles of the primary colors red, yellow, and blue on a white or gray ground did nothing less than revolutionize the art world and forever changed the view of pictorial reality.

Starting with works from Piet Mondrian’s main Neoplastic phase, the exhibition offers a glimpse into the cosmos of the many new creations, adaptations, confrontations, and further developments of his artistically groundbreaking compositions: from artworks by his immediate contemporaries in the context of De Stijl to the famous Mondrian cocktail dresses by Yves Saint Laurent, objects of applied art, design, and everyday culture, as well as numerous works and installations by contemporary artists.

Re-Inventing Piet. Mondrian and the Consequences is being realized in cooperation with the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen, where the exhibition will be on view from September 2023 to January 2024. Accompanying the exhibition, a comprehensive publication will be published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König with texts by Friedrich von Borries, Nancy J. Troy, Wolfgang Ullrich, Marek Wieczorek, and others (ed. Andreas Beitin, René Zechlin, ca. 256 pages).