Image: Original illustration

Supplemented by works from the museum’s collection and a documentary film
(Film Chamber and adjacent galleries)

On June 11, 2025, Heinz-Günter Prager (born 1944 in Herne) passed away in Cologne. A long
history connects our museum with the artist. In March 2025, the Museum
Morsbroich received an extensive collection of prints from Heinz-Günter Prager. This
donation is featured in the exhibition in the Graphic Arts Cabinet. “Flügelschlag” features
squares, lines, and ellipses. The forms are reminiscent of Prager’s sculptures and drawings. “Flügelschlag” commemorates Heinz-Günter Prager and his artistic oeuvre.

Heinz-Günter Prager was a sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker. His sculptures, mostly made of
steel, were presented by the Morsbroich Museum in 1979 in a major solo exhibition. The museum first exhibited Prager’s drawings—created, for example, with graphite or oil pastel—in 1994.

Now we turn our attention to an aspect of his body of work that has received little attention
to date: printmaking. The exhibition “Flügelschlag” features 42 prints
by Prager (consisting of 4 portfolios and 15 individual works) and thus the artist’s entire donation of prints to the museum.

Prager’s large steel work “Zylinderskulptur I” is perhaps the first artwork that
visitors in Morsbroich see as they step through the gate into the castle courtyard. Elements from this work—as well as from many of Prager’s other sculptural pieces—are reflected in his prints: plates become surfaces, rods become lines, tubes become ellipses (and vice versa).

Defying the laws of physics, to which sculpture is always bound, Prager reimagines his repertoire of motifs in his prints. He stacks, he conceals, he balances, he erects. New objects emerge: not three-dimensional as in the case of his sculptures, not spontaneous and immediate as in his drawings, but deliberately composed on a two-dimensional plane and brilliantly executed through the interplay of form and color.

Prager’s drawings do not depict spaces constructed through the use of perspective. While
his sculptures are firmly anchored to the ground, the objects in his drawings seem to float, drift, or even fall. Freely placed forms and an undefined space encourage the viewer to make associations.

Curators: Fritz Emslander, Lila Gielow
Text: Lila Gielow