A new exhibition at Berlin's Brücke Museum presents the work of Irma Stern (1894-1966), a German-South African expressionist painter whose career was marked by persecution under Nazi rule and later patronage by South Africa's apartheid regime. The exhibition, titled "Irma Stern: A Modern Artist between Berlin and Cape Town," running until November 2, represents only the second institutional solo show of the artist's work in Germany since her ostracization by the Nazi regime. The first exhibition at Kunsthalle Bielefeld took place nearly 30 years ago.

Stern's characteristic portrait paintings of Black and Arab subjects walk a fine line between colonialist exoticization and striking subject sovereignty. Bold color bridges emerge from her canvases, pushing subjects from flatness into three-dimensional space. Flashes of her signature red appear in the sometimes antagonistic eyes of her portrait-heavy oeuvre. The work of this Jewish but white artist in apartheid South Africa offers a valuable exercise in postcolonial thinking, demonstrating the intersection of dimensions of oppression and privilege.

Born in the small town of Schweizer-Reneke in a Boer settlement area and artistically trained in Berlin and Weimar, Stern achieved great success in Europe from the 1920s onward with her African depictions following European avant-garde traditions. There, as a supposed Africa expert, she satisfied the hunger for images of the non-European world. As a result of this recognition, she simultaneously became an important representative of European modernism within South Africa.

However, the exhibition fails to mention that the apartheid government brought about the peak of Stern's career from 1948 onward. By massively supporting her work through travel assistance and financing international exhibitions, the regime also instrumentalized her art to defend the state project as modern and based on Eurocentric values. Meanwhile, visiting restrictions to Black communities made it more difficult for the artist to access her subjects.

The small exhibition makes an effort toward differentiated analysis, but ultimately lacks the persistence needed for thorough examination. The historicization of Stern's work remains painfully indirect. While numerous political key points are established, the exhibition only sporadically traces the concrete or cultural-political consequences for the artist and her work. Why the pressing question of Stern's political navigation, clearly raised by the historically sensitive framing of the exhibition, is not discussed based on her revealing writings remains incomprehensible.

Her active benefiting from apartheid and the internal conflict that flares up in her partly contradictory texts remain as underexposed as the only hinted-at hostilities in decidedly anti-Semitic South Africa. If decolonial re-education of the hegemonic gaze is the goal of this analysis, one would wish for more decisive embedding in painterly discourse alongside source material from the visual regimes of that time.

The wall texts do identify reductive gestures, such as the feminization of Arab men and the typologization of facial features based on West African masks. However, for a general public that has not yet deconstructed and internalized colonial visual languages, these evaluations are difficult to follow without precise evidence in the images. The guestbook testifies to this, full of incomprehension for what appears to be an anachronistic imposition of today's analytical categories.

Historical comparative works of orientalizing or primitivist painting styles would probably have built a better bridge for communication as an art-didactic foundation. The two existing mask images lack problematization. The exact tracking of Stern's painting method ultimately remains decisive. The wall texts invite viewers to consider the reserve of the portrayed subjects as a withdrawal from the white artist's gaze.

The imagined increase in agency of BIPOC figures would be an important step in unlearning the Eurocentric visual perspective, if it didn't float ahistorically in space without contextualization. This completely undermines the most tension-filled facet of Stern's work - her decision to portray inaccessibility in subjects. Here lies the central unanswered question: To what extent does the artist reproduce modernist racisms with her wild, impasto brushstroke, and to what extent might she simultaneously react critically to racist hierarchies in the self-reflexivity of the painting situation?