Philipp Gufler: Traces of Paul

At the turn of the 20th century, Paul Hoecker was one of the most influential personalities of the Munich art scene, but his life and work were long forgotten. As a painter, academy professor, and co-founder of the Munich Secession, he worked in a time of profound change in which traditional visual languages met experimental ideas of modernism and redefined art. His life was shaken by a scandal in 1898: rumors about a picture of the Virgin Mary, in which a male sex worker is said to have served as a model, forced Hoecker to resign from his professorship.

At the Forum Queeres Archiv München, a research group has been researching his life and work since 2019. This publication is published on the occasion of the exhibition Imitations of Paul by Philipp Gufler at Galerie BQ in Berlin. In it, Gufler enters into a dialogue with the painter Paul Hoecker, whose life and work were long marginalized and whose extensive oeuvre has not yet been fully explored. With texts by Karin Althaus, Gerhard Becker, Vera Christoph, Stefan Gruhne, Philipp Gufler, Birgit Jooss, Yuliia Kizyma, Nicholas Maniu, Christina Spachtholz, Arnisa Zeqo (German/English)