Ben Willikens Painting Installed in the Busch-Reisinger Museum

The painting Berlin, Reich Chancellery (Hall of Honor), by the German painter Ben Willikens (b. 1939), is on display at the Busch-Reisinger Museum through March 8.

The 1996 painting is from the series Places: Munich, Nuremberg, Berlin. "We are pleased to be presenting this important painting from a major new series by one of Germany's leading representational artists," said Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

"Willikens, whose compelling paintings have not been shown in the United States before, has a unique and challenging approach to difficult subject matter, and we are grateful to the artist and to Carol Johnssen for making this special presentation possible by lending the painting." Support for the presentation of Berlin, Reich Chancellery (Hall of Honor) was provided by the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

Willikens has always dealt with public spaces of power and authority. In the early 1970s, he reworked his personal experiences as a clinic in-patient into antiseptic, quietly terrifying images of hospital interiors and their institutional equipment. The following two decades saw a turn to grander, more luminous, often imaginary spaces, including depopulated renderings of the architectural settings in Leonardo's Last Supper (1976-77) and Raphael's School of Athens (1987-88). Since the mid-1980s, he has also undertaken numerous mural commissions from corporate and state organizations, as well as designing stage sets for theater and opera productions. His most recent series, including Berlin, Reich Chancellery (Hall of Honor), undertakes the delicate task of investigating the spatial qualities of official buildings designed for the genocidal National Socialist dictatorship in Germany during the 1930s and early 1940s.

The painting installed in the Busch-Reisinger renders a room in Adolf Hitler's New Reich Chancellery, designed in 1938-39 by Albert Speer (1905-1981). The viewer will see one end of the famous "mosaic hall" (46.2 meters long and 19 meters wide), part of the procession of ceremonial spaces leading visitors towards the Führer's reception room and offices. The walls and floor of this "hall of honor" were decorated with light grey and gold mosaics set into red marble, the side panels depicting paired eagles. Badly damaged in World War II, the Chancellery was razed to the ground by Soviet occupying forces in 1948.

Ben Willikens was born in 1939. He studied painting at the Stuttgart Academy in 1962-65, and has exhibited throughout Europe. He is represented in numerous public collections, including the Busch-Reisinger Museum. He currently teaches at the Academy in Munich.