Summer BReak

The Zander Collection will be closed from August 6 to August 25, 2026. We look forward to welcoming you back from September 5, 2026, for our exhibition Adalbert Trillhaase.

EXHIBITION 9

Adalbert Trillhaase

5.9.2026 – 17.10.2026

You are cordially invited to the opening on Friday, September 4, from 6 – 9 pm.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on the occasion of this year’s DC Open. Opening hours: Saturday, September 5, from 1–7 pm and Sunday, September 6, from 1–5 pm

The human being stands at the center of Adalbert Trillhaase’s paintings and drawings. He portrays people or depicts them in relation to their surroundings: his daughter as a modern woman, the elegant passenger and his coachman battling a pack of wolves, the magician who seems to be conjuring a wild boar and a dog. Art and science make allegorical appearances in human form. Trillhaase expends great care on modeling the delicate faces of his figures; their postures are dynamic and vividly present. They strike the viewer as affecting and graceful, as though captured in mid-dance. In this way, he endows every one of his characters with their own personality and underscores their individuality. Some are set within richly detailed landscapes or before sketch-like backdrops; others are rendered entirely without such physical context. Their unconstrained arrangement and the dynamism of the compositions amplify the narrative impact of his works.

Adalbert Trillhaase is born in Erfurt in 1858 to a family of merchants. After completing a commercial apprenticeship, he initially tries his hand at business in various places, running a linen weaving mill and an iron works—ventures that prove unsuccessful. After the death of his father-in-law, his wife inherits houses and pieces of land, which Trillhaase now manages and which secure the family’s financial independence. In 1920, they move into a home on Düsseldorf’s Hindenburgwall, just a stone’s throw from Johanna Ey’s gallery Junge Kunst—Frau Ey. The gallery is the hub of the Junges Rheinland—an artists’ association that Trillhaase will later join.

Trillhaase does not start painting before he is sixty. His first pictures show hunters and bellowing stags, which soon give way to biblical scenes, motifs from distant lands, and portraits. In the literature on Trillhaase, the artist Otto Pankok is usually credited with having “discovered” him: legend has it that he observed him sitting at his writing desk, pensively gazing at the grain of the wood and discerning images in it. It was allegedly also Pankok who encouraged Trillhaase not just to seek out these images in the wood but to paint them with his own hand. The neat emotional appeal of this narrative, however, is what makes it seem implausible. Two publications by Pankok shape the public reception of Trillhaase’s work; it is he who introduces the stylistically questionable comparison to Henri Rousseau, placing the artist in the context of so-called “naïve art.”

More credible is the account given by Trillhaase’s daughter Felicitas Haller, an artist in her own right and a member of the Expressionist circle in the Rhineland around the gallerist Alfred Flechtheim. She recognizes the quality in his first works as early as 1918 and introduces him to the protagonists of the Düsseldorf art scene.

From the start, Trillhaase is a committed and active member of the Junges Rheinland, which is founded in 1919. His work embodies the ideals to which the artists’ association aspires: in its quest for a new art, it breaks with academic convention to allow for a more open, freer form of creative articulation. Trillhaase forms personal bonds with the artists that speak from numerous portraits, including Otto Dix’s painting The Family of the Painter Adalbert Trillhaase (1923) and Arthur Kaufmann’s group portrait The Contemporaries (1925). At the same time, Trillhaase engages with the Expressionist and Dadaist tendencies of his time. His visual language grows increasingly expressive and surreal: his figures more and more often strike exaggerated poses, while the structure of his pictorial spaces disintegrates or vanishes entirely. Trillhaase’s contemporaries are fascinated by the liberties that he takes in his art.

The Junges Rheinland and its successor groups, including the Rheinische Sezession and the Rheingruppe, at times count over four hundred members. Among its most defining exponents are artists like Otto Dix, Max Ernst, Marta Hegemann, Arthur Kaufmann, and Gert Heinrich Wollheim, as well as art historians and art dealers like Walter Cohen, Johanna Ey, and Alfred Flechtheim.

After the National Socialists seize power, the Junges Rheinland is brought into line and incorporated into state organizations. The fates of its members vary: they emigrate or join the resistance—some are arrested and interned; others adapt to the new system. Trillhaase’s works are among those the Nazis classify as “degenerate,” and he is banned from painting. His work Spanish Woman is seized from the municipal art collection in Düsseldorf and destroyed. It may have been a portrait of Johanna Ey, who often had herself depicted as a Spanish woman in traditional garb. Trillhaase retires to Niederdollendorf near Königswinter in 1935 and dies there in 1936.

His daughter Felicitas Haller saves his oeuvre, moving it to France in 1939 and subsequently to Switzerland. Shortly after the end of the war, she devotes an exhibition at her gallery in Zurich to her father’s work. About seventy-five paintings and two hundred and fifty drawings by Trillhaase are known to be extant today.

During his lifetime, Trillhaase contributes to numerous group exhibitions organized by the Junges Rheinland. After the disruption of the Second World War, his work is only rarely seen in this context; he is now typically featured in presentations of so-called “naïve art.” He is included in the exhibitions Moderne primitive Maler at Kunsthalle Bern in 1949 and Die Kunst der Naiven at Haus der Kunst, Munich, and Kunsthaus Zürich in 1974/75.

Charlotte Zander starts acquiring works by Adalbert Trillhaase in 1977 and displays them at international fairs. The three paintings, fifteen drawings, and one print that are in the Zander Collection today exemplify the artist’s themes.

The exhibition is curated by Lisa Arndt and Mathis Henne.

Charlotte Zander:
COLLECTOR, GALLERIST, MUSEUM FOUNDER

10.10.25 – 25.9.26

Milestone Cooperation on Self-Taught and Outsider Artists’ Work in Cologne. The Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek and ZADIK Receive Major Gifts from the Zander Collection

In 1997, Charlotte Zander was the first woman to be honored with the ART COLOGNE Award for her formidable dedication to “naïve art.” Twenty-eight years later, the documentation and scholarly study of the works of self-taught and outsider artists are firmly established in Cologne, with permanent representation at three venues: last fall, the nonprofit Zander Collection inaugurated an exhibition space in Cologne where exhibitions of works from the collection are held on a regular basis. Susanne Zander now gifts the internationally unrivaled specialized library with literature on the collection’s themes to the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek Köln (KMB), where scholars can access it effective immediately. Meanwhile, the collector, gallery owner, and museum founder Charlotte Zander’s archive has been entrusted to ZADIK, where it is being made accessible to researchers. ZADIK is preparing a thematically focused exhibition, which will open in 2025.

Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck, director of ZADIK, is delighted: “In the extensive archival material documenting Charlotte Zander’s work, ZADIK now possesses a stock of high-quality sources providing insight into her collection-building activities going back to the 1950s. Because she turned her personal passion into a profession, founding a gallery and, later, a museum, the archive also enables us to learn more about the international networks of dealers and museums handling and showcasing ‘naïve art.’”

Susanne Zander, CEO of Sammlung Zander, is confident that the gifts have opened up new avenues of access to the work of self-taught and outsider artists for specialists and the broader public alike: “One objective of our work with the Zander Collection is to facilitate and promote scholarly engagement with this art. We want to establish Cologne as a central setting of such research. The gifts, which also encompass my personal extensive library on so-called outsider art, are a vital step toward this goal. We are moreover developing new projects involving the collection that embed our exhibitions in diverse discursive and scholarly contexts.”

Elke Purpus, director of the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek, is inviting the interested public to come and start reading: “We have already entered 2,449 publications into our online catalogue—the work is almost complete. We look forward to welcoming many visitors wishing to consult the Zander Library.”

Bringing both an archive and the related specialized library to Cologne is a model that ZADIK and the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek have successfully implemented in a series of instances. They underscore its advantages: “It is only a short walk from one institution to the other, enabling scholars to take full advantage of the two related sets of holdings—a collaboration we intend to consolidate and expand on.”