The former diesel power plant CB Dieselkraftwerk (BLMK) in Cottbus, which reflects the city’s industrial spirit, is currently examining one of the art world’s hottest debates — gender roles and the concept of masculinity — with historical depth. The exhibition “Gemachte Männer” investigates how masculinity has been “manufactured” from the Weimar Republic to the present day, how it has been ideologically moulded, and ultimately how these moulds have cracked, through approximately 90 works.
Curator Christopher Straub begins with a cleverly constructed prologue: Gerhard Großmann’s 1931 “Armed Workers” and Erich Gerlach’s “Return Home” (1947), which reflects post-war trauma, erect the two main pillars of the East German (DDR) male image: the workers’ struggle and pacifist anti-fascism.
Industrial Masculinity and Steel Discipline
In the exhibition’s early sections, the sharp hierarchies and dichotomies described in Pierre Bourdieu’s “Masculine Domination” come vividly to life. In 1950s DDR art, man is first and foremost an “industrial hero”. In Lea Grundig’s lithograph “Underground”, muscular male bodies are shown overcoming the party-dictated work plan in “heroic nakedness”. Helmut Diehl’s “Young Tractor Driver” celebrates the individual as a disciplined and tough part of the socialist collective.
Here, masculinity is identified with production, struggle and an aggressive expansion towards the outside world. Figures such as Ernst Thälmann are depicted in posters looking determinedly into the distance — towards the “bright socialist future” — with clenched fists, over the viewer’s head. The perspective is always from below, creating the impression that these gigantic male figures could crush all obstacles of history in a single stroke.
Cracking Images and Ironic Distance
By the 1980s, however, along with the rigid state rationality of the DDR, the authoritarian male figures also begin to shake. As curator Straub puts it, “the 1968 generation severs its ties with the authoritarian male image of their fathers and begins to look at traditional iconography with ironic distance.”
We see the most striking traces of this transformation in works such as Max Uhlig’s “Male Portrait”. Uhlig dissolves fixed figures with stormy and irregular brushstrokes; what stands before us is no longer a subject who rules the world with patriarchal dominance, but a fragile and uncertain one who has lost his place in the socialist world. Joseph W. Huber, referencing Rubens’ “The Judgement of Paris”, mocks the status quo by turning Paris into a postmodern and lonely man trying to choose among newspaper personal ads.
The New World Behind the Wall: Hedonism and Toxic Transformation
With the fall of the Wall in 1989, a consumption-driven hedonism takes over the stage. Norbert Bisky’s 2008 painting “Ekstase” (Ecstasy) seems like a symbol of this new era: a young male figure lost in colourful, vibrant and techno-happiness… Yet beneath this glittering surface lies raw lust and violence emanating from and directed back at the male body.
The exhibition’s epilogue knots together at a rather disturbing point. The multimedia installation “Bereitschaft” (Readiness) by Jakob Ganslmeier & Ana Zibelnik exposes the model of combat-ready masculinity that spreads online today, imitating fascist aesthetics and fed by a toxic body cult.
“Gemachte Männer” is not merely a historical reconstruction; it is a deeply unsettling and highly topical examination of the power of images and how masculinity can be politically shaped. It can be seen in Cottbus until 17 May.
Dates: Until 17 May 2026
Venue: BLMK Dieselkraftwerk, Cottbus
