Twenty years after the last big solo exhibition about the working of Edgar Ende, the Museum Villa Rot dedicates itself to this artist and his extraordinary ouvre in a great retrospective of rediscovery. Edgar Ende (1901 – 1965), who has already shown his works in the USA before World War II, and who was ostracised in National Socialism and later was shown two times on the Biennale in Venice, ranks among the great German painters of the 20th century. He is classified as a leading exponent of surrealism in Europe and still, today he is almost forgotten. His picturesque work which he made in the years between 1920 and 1965 is hardly present. Edgar Ende’s metaphorical imagery, his drawings, gouaches and oil paintings are stylistically and mentally close to the French surrealism and the Pittura Metafisica. His metaphysical sceneries, apocalyptical visions and mythological shapes and figures find their literary echo in the fantastic stories of his son Michael Ende. Today, in a time of increasing alienation, it is observable in art that there is a recollection of the reservoir of the unconscious. Dreamlike, visionary and surrealistic worlds of images found their ways into the painting of the present. By this means the art of Edgar Ende seems at the beginning of the 21th century more topical than ever.
