Hedwig Holtz-Sommer –
What really matters is humanity (Auf das Menschliche kommt es an)
From 12 October 2025, the Kunstmuseum Ahrenshoop will present paintings, watercolors, monotypes, and drawings by Hedwig Holtz-Sommer. With around 80 works, the exhibition offers a concentrated insight into the life’s work of the painter, for whom artistic creation became a medium of profound search for meaning in a time of enormous social upheaval. The focus lies on her creative years in Wustrow on the Fischland peninsula.
Like her predecessors in the artists’ colony of Ahrenshoop, Hedwig Holtz-Sommer sought the true and the original in the expression of simple things and people. Her painterly work can only be grasped in fragments, yet a number of portraits and depictions of everyday scenes in Wustrow give a strong impression of her ability in this field. She is best known for her watercolors, sheets of captivating luminosity and color, several of which are on view in the exhibition. Holtz-Sommer’s graphic work is shaped almost entirely by the human figure. Particularly moving are the works created during the wartime and post-war years of the 1940s and 1950s.
