A retired art teacher who typically declines exhibition requests has made an exception for a new special exhibition at the Riesa City Museum. The exhibition, titled "Faces of Work," features nearly one hundred artworks by various visual artists depicting the Riesa Steel and Rolling Mill during the period between 1945 and 1990, opening to the public on Sunday, October 19.
Bernd Gruhle, a 74-year-old painter and former art education teacher at Werner Heisenberg Gymnasium in Riesa-Gröba, is among the featured artists. Some know him primarily for his painting work, while others remember him as their art teacher or their children's instructor. For about ten years since retiring from teaching, Gruhle has lived a withdrawn life in his birthplace in the municipality of Nünchritz, focusing mainly on landscape maintenance and consistently declining exhibition requests for years.
Gruhle explains his reluctance to participate in exhibitions, citing his long-standing frustration with the contemporary art scene. However, the situation was different when museum director Anja Hirschberg approached him about the steel mill exhibition. Her persistence and the appealing exhibition concept convinced him to provide works from his private collection for the show.
Unlike some paintings by his role model Paul Häusler, who was already working in Riesa's largest factory in the 1960s, Gruhle's steel mill scenes and portraits almost all originate from the second half of the 1980s. The creation of these works began with a school visit to the steel mill, which Gruhle recalls as a transformative experience. "I found it totally cool: the light, those contrasts!" he remembers.
The artist began regularly visiting the factory to sketch, with his school administration allowing him one day off per week for this purpose. A factory pass provided access to the plant grounds. "It was such a small card, with which I could go through the gate and then walk around wherever I wanted," Gruhle explains. Initially, he was primarily interested in the massive machinery and the visual impressions it created: the peculiar bluish shimmer in the factory halls, orange-red fire, sparks, and glowing hot, reddish workpieces emerging from the furnaces.
Over time, the people working in the factory became increasingly interesting to him. "It was also fascinating how many different characters were gathered in one place," the artist reflects. The factory workers reacted quite differently to his presence, he recalls. Most didn't care that he was there, while others were openly receptive and engaging. "I could talk excellently with them," he says, referring to workers like one featured in a portrait in the exhibition. However, some steel workers couldn't stand him and made sure he felt it. Despite this hostility, he made numerous sketches of one such worker, which later became large-format oil paintings in his studio.
When asked if he would be interested in returning to sketch in today's factory, Gruhle responds pragmatically: "Well, I'm old." He's certain that free access to the facility like in the past would no longer be possible. "No one would take responsibility anymore if something fell on your head," he notes. However, visiting the factory wasn't safe for outsiders even 40 years ago. He recalls walking toward the rotary hearth furnace when suddenly a container crashed down next to him. At the rotary furnace itself, while sketching in front of the control station, he once wondered why there was a strange smell, only to discover that flying sparks had caused his wool scarf in his pocket to start smoldering. Unlike the scarf, Gruhle survived his factory excursions unharmed, as did most of his sketches made there.
The artist is now pleased that several of these sketches and oil paintings will be displayed in an exhibition shortly before his 75th birthday. "The exhibition is well done," he praises during his visit to the Riesa Museum, where final preparations for the show are underway. "When I see it all here, I don't think it's so stupid that I agreed." This sentiment delights museum director Anja Hirschberg, who is hopeful that an art exhibition about the steel mill and the work there will resonate with Riesa residents.
The exhibition is structured so that visitors first see paintings with city views featuring the steel mill smokestacks, then proceed as if entering the factory itself, where they observe the workers through the artists' eyes during their daily work. A special feature of the exhibition is a specially created exhibition catalog of approximately 120 pages, which will be available fresh from the printer at the exhibition opening on Friday. Gruhle has already reserved a copy for himself, though he hints he probably won't attend the opening ceremony, suggesting there are still some things to which the artist cannot be persuaded.
