The exhibition LIFELINE traces the life of Dieter Mammel’s family from Romania via Serbia and Austria to Germany.

His grandmother comes from Timişoara/Romania, his grandfather from Kačarevo/Serbia. From there, the grandmother and her two daughters fled to the countryside near Linz/Austria during the Second World War until the grandfather was released from captivity after seven years and the family moved to Reutlingen/Germany.

Previous stations of the LIFELINE exhibition are the National Museum of Arts in Timişoara/Romania, the Svilara Cultural Center in Novi Sad/Serbia and the DZM (Danube Swabian Central Museum) in Ulm.

The exhibition ties in thematically with Dieter Mammel’s childhood pictures from the “family works” exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bonn and illustrates how strongly the war experience of grandparents and parents affects the next generation. The painter describes it as a family legacy that is anchored in his DNA and still shapes his painting today.

He interprets the fact that the topic of flight suddenly caught up with him in 2015 as a coincidence. Dieter Mammel witnesses the arrival of the first Syrian refugee boats on the Greek island of Kos. Back in Germany, he draws with refugee children in refugee centres in Berlin. This resulted in the project “Show me where you come from”. Over 200 drawings by the children are shown with Mammel’s documentary film of the same name at Haus am Waldsee, at the Berlin Cathedral and at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main.

At the same time, a series of “Transit” pictures will be created, which illustrate the artist’s intense preoccupation with his family’s flight and which he continues in his examination of contemporary migration. Inspired by woodcuts, Dieter Mammel’s painting concentrates on light and shadow and cyclically on just one color, ink on a wet, primed canvas, painted on the floor. The pictures threaten to dissolve and reinforce the desire to capture fleeting time and the memory of family and personal life paths. The eye seeks a foothold similar to the fugitive’s search for a lifeline in the midst of an overwhelming wave. Thus LIFELINE is not only to be understood as a life path.

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive catalogue with 100 paintings from over twenty years of his work and text contributions by curator Astrid Beyer and Christoph Tannert, the director of the International Cultural Center Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin.