Documenta 7, held in Kassel in 1982, was curated by Rudi Fuchs. It is widely recognized as the institutional ratification of Neo-Expressionism. Fuchs included Baselitz, Lüpertz, Penck, Immendorff, Kiefer, and the Italian Transavanguardia painters alongside American Neo-Expressionists. The exhibition placed the German painters in the context of a broader international return to figuration and painting.
The 1982 Documenta is the moment when the movement moved from scandal and gallery culture into the permanent collection. Fuchs’s catalogue essay defended the return to painting against the conceptual orthodoxies of the 1970s, making Documenta 7 both a summary and a legitimization.
See also
- Zeitgeist — the German companion exhibition, 1982
- A New Spirit in Painting — the London canonization, 1981
- galerie-michael-werner — the commercial infrastructure