Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Dissertation - Restricted Access (SIA Only)

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Contemporary Art

Abstract

This dissertation delves into the question: How did Painting in the 1980s, particularly through the work of the Neue Wilde embody queer expression and iconoclastic freedom, and to what extent did West-Berlin's unique and cultural context shape this artistic output? Focusing on the Berlin based Neue Wilde Artists, specifically the Moritzboys (Rainer Fetting, Salomé, Helmut Middendorf, Bernd Zimmer, Luciano Castelli and Elvira Bach) the dissertation examines how West-Berlin's subcultural scene of punk, drag and queer activism fostered a radical redefinition of figuration. Through close visual analysis and archival research as well as the engagement with theoretical frameworks by Douglas Crimp, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Judith Butler and others, the study argues that the Moritzboys transformed painting into an instrument for visibility, desire, and defiance. Their practices channel the tensions and subcultures of an enclaved West-Berlin, its eroticism, urban landscape, and politics of representation, into a painterly format that during the 1970s/1980s resisted an artistic scene dominated by abstraction and conceptual art. Ultimately, the dissertation concludes that the Moritzboys art both reflected and shaped West-Berlin's identity as a space for transgression and liberation. Establishing their paintings as a site for negotiation on queer modernity and artistic freedom within Cold-War Berlin.

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