Reading Rämistrasse #175: Aoife Rosenmeyer on The Weight of Being. Wilhelm Lehmbruck – The Final Years. Dialogue with Yves Netzhammer at Kunsthaus Zürich

German sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck was born in Meiderich in 1881 and died in Berlin in 1919. In 1970 he was reincarnated in Switzerland, a baby that would be named Yves Netzhammer. – The most sceptical observer might be tempted to believe this the moment they enter the two-room and largely two-man presentation O Mensch! (1) The exhibition goes beyond formal similarities to sound ringing thematic and tonal chords throughout an astutely composed concert of the two practices.

A marble figure, crumpled in a heap on the museum floor, heralds the exhibition. Netzhammer’s untitled 2025 work (all Netzhammer works are from this year) is life size, the rounded, characterless limbs only loosely arranged and attached in the artist’s familiar style. Turn right into the show proper, where the daylight of the atrium becomes chiaroscuro, and the figure has drawn itself upright. Or, rather, we meet the most – and not particularly – confident of Lehmbruck’s figures, the tall, lean bronze Ascending Youth, 1913/14. His arms are half-akimbo, hands turned inwards, the head and gaze equally introverted from the spotlight. The sober scene is thus set for a close investigation of the short period of Lehmbruck’s career from 1914 onwards, some of it living in Zürich, until his death by suicide five years later. To frame this, Netzhammer not only produced works for the exhibition, but also designed the whole presentation. While Netzhammer’s animations and sculptures move fleet-footed around Lehmbruck’s drawings, paintings and sculptures, the former’s works don’t overshadow the latter. Three iterations of a leaning Lehmbruck torso from 1918 cut through the room; Netzhammer’s animated drawing object, meanwhile, is tucked under the plinth. Lehmbruck’s works vibrate with mute anguish; Netzhammer begins to express that pain.

The exhibition orbits around three bronze Lehmbruck sculptures: the opening youth; then Seated Youth of 1916/17 who now has a curved back and bowed head, elbows propped on thighs; and the desolate Fallen Man of 1915, who, head sunk, just manages to hold his body above the ground. This tragic narrative arc is in keeping with the contemporaneous Great War; the first sculpture was made in Paris, after which Lehmbruck had to return to Germany. The artist did not experience active service, but worked briefly as a paramedic before leaving Germany for Zürich in 1916. The upheaval of the period might be read in the exhibition architecture, a combination of flat and propped surfaces; this, the scaffold-like housing for another rotor sculpture and the visible ceiling structure feel provisional or incomplete. Projected down one of the slanted boards, an endless series of Netzhammer figures and constellations teeter and slide, no matter what metamorphosis they undergo as they travel; what looks like a reflection in the ceiling turns out to be a further projection, an unexplained illumination in strips.

The main gallery, with the works mentioned, several more Lehmbruck works on paper and canvas and dozens of smaller sculptural objects by Netzhammer, would alone be a triumph. It’s followed by a second gallery, a blue room that hones in on the German’s experience in Zürich – his works, his peers, his influences and his infatuation with actor Elisabeth Bergner. Smaller sculptures and archival materials are shown on a shelf that runs around the room, while Netzhammer line drawings unfurl in projections across the walls. The Zürich connection might be an argument for this exhibition, yet interesting as the material is, the winning argument is how the main space illustrates the striking non-specific relevance that can be found in some of Lehmbruck’s and most of Netzhammer’s works. This non-specificity is described in the exhibition texts as the ‘suprapersonal’ nature of Lehmbruck’s subjects; Netzhammer’s figures and forms have long resembled stripped-down shop-window mannequins, all the better to slip, unencumbered, fluidly between genders and species. Without identifying features, both artist’s subjects are equally bereft of any protection. This everyman is not a privileged, model standard, but an anybody coping or crippled by all that the world throws at them. The fragility of a body, adrift, feels very relevant at this moment in time.

(1) The English exhibition title is actually The Weight of Being; I prefer the German.

The Weight of Being. Wilhelm Lehmbruck – The Final Years. Dialogue with Yves Netzhammer, Kunsthaus Zürich, Heimplatz
8001 Zürich, 24 October 2025–18 January 2026