Helen Frankenthaler moves Jenny Brosinski, Ina Gerken, Adrian Schiess

The Museum Reinhard Ernst (mre) dedicates the year 2025 to the artist Helen Frankenthaler with two temporary exhibitions. Following on from Helen Frankenthaler. Move and Make (on view until 5 October 2025), the mre invites visitors to experience the pioneering art of the American artist in dialogue with the present in Helen Frankenthaler moves: Jenny Brosinski (born 1984), Ina Gerken (born 1987) and Adrian Schiess (born 1959) have selected some of Frankenthaler’s previously unseen works from the Reinhard Ernst Collection and staged a joint exhibition with their own works.

Helen Frankenthaler moves Jenny Brosinski, Ina Gerken, Adrian Schiess convincingly illustrates how Frankenthaler’s painterly versatility and innovative spirit still inspires today. We thus tell a story that begins with her and is independently developed and confidently continued by the above three artists.

This unique exhibition experience offers an insight into the world’s largest private collection of Frankenthaler’s works while opening up a multifaceted encounter with contemporary abstract painting from Germany and Switzerland.

Jenny Brosinski (*1984, Berlin) responds to the visual tradition of Abstract Expressionism through a radical formal reduction on large-scale paintings. Like Frankenthaler, she works on unprimed canvas. Her spontaneous, raw approach gives rise to a lightness and openness that redefines the expressive gesture.

Ina Gerken (*1987, Düsseldorf) creates works with finely tuned layers of colour that evoke atmospheric landscapes. During her residency at the Frankenthaler House at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine (USA), Gerken immersed herself in Frankenthaler’s painterly process—an influence that resonates in her sensitive approach to colour and composition.

Adrian Schiess (*1959, Le Locle/Zurich) presents iridescent, colour-intensive floor panels, its smooth surfaces challenging the boundaries of the classical painting format. His method, which forgoes personal signature, connects with Frankenthaler’s open painting processes and expands them into the spatial realm.