"Dip in the Past" shows the recurring preoccupation of painting with its own history. With the Blaue Reiter―its art and its theoretical considerations―at its core, the Lenbachhaus collection has a substantial starting point that keeps all further developments of modern painting and their discourses in view. Since the early post-war period, through the 1960s to the 1980s, and into the more recent past, painting has undergone various developments and manifestations that are represented in our holdings in excerpts and as examples. "Dip in the Past" therefore explores the various extensions of painting in postwar history. In the exhibition, artists of different generations and different cultural traditions are in dialogue with each other. This results in references of content and possibilities for dealing with the history and present of painting.

Classical color field painters such as Marcia Hafif and Rolf Rose are juxtaposed with the Maria Lassnig Award winner Atta Kwami, who incorporates the rhythms of West African fabric patterns into his color improvisations. Conceptual positions are represented by Max Cole with her concentrated minimalism, which is also reminiscent of textile structure, as well as Matti Braun and Shannon Bool, who both use silk as a picture carrier and thus also expand painting by introducing a textile component. The references and results could not be more different. With Mojé Assefjah and Daniel Knorr we show two artists who emerged from the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s. We show Daniel Knorr's conceptual sculptural work with its functional use of color. His work "Dip in the Past“ has given the exhibition its title. Mojé Assefjah's paintings represent a color-intensive dynamically animated painting. Her brushwork and use of color refer to and interpret references and quotations from the history of painting. She is joined by U.S. painter Loie Hollowell with a similar palette but geometrically fixed form that stimulates the depths of the imagination by alluding to the physical-organic.

"Dip in the Past" as an exhibition is dedicated to the interaction between the two collections of Lenbachhaus and KiCo Foundation. The KiCo Foundation was founded by Doris Keller-Riemer and Hans-Gerd Riemer in Bonn and has been based at the Kunstmuseum Bonn and the Lenbachhaus Munich since the mid-1990s. In its early days, the collection focused on monochrome color painting, but over the course of two decades it has expanded to include a broad spectrum of contemporary art. In close cooperation and coordination between the collector couple and the two museums, the collection is continuously being expanded, thus enabling the museum holdings to be supplemented in a meaningful way as well. The KiCo Collection will play a key role in helping the Lenbachhaus to pursue its own collection policy in the years to come.