Born in 1967 and raised during the Cold War, Johannes Wohnseifer’s work is grounded in the turbulent historical events he experienced during his youth in Germany. In Adler Bild 1972 II, he invokes a wealth of cultural, political and artistic reference. Painted in 1999, it is one of three works based on Gerhard Richter’s photorealist painting Adler (Eagle) of 1972, and was shown during the year of its creation in Wohnseifer’s landmark installation Museum at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Richter had been invited to create Adler for Marcel Broodthaers’ seminal project The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, XIXth Century Section: a subversive commentary on the function of cultural institutions. Originally concocted from packing crates and postcards in Broodthaers’ apartment, the museum’s symbol was the eagle: a folkloric emblem for Germanic power that had somewhat lost its potency following its co-option by the Third Reich. By choosing such a loaded piece of imagery, Broodthaers – and indeed Richter – sought to question the tacit values that history imposes upon society.

Displayed in a single room behind a white nylon curtain within the Museum Ludwig’s collection of Pop Art, Wohnseifer’s Museum had its roots in Broodthaers’ project. Alongside the three painterly reproductions of Richter’s Adler, the artist built three Plexiglas containers in which he displayed prototypes for the sneakers he was developing in collaboration with Adidas. The sneakers, combined with the auspicious date of Richter’s original picture, evoked an important historical reference point for Wohnseifer: the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Indeed, one of the artist’s first reported memories of television was the interruption of the Olympic broadcast by the Palestinian terrorist attacks on nine Israeli athletes. In keeping with this theme, Wohnseifer placed sixteen square wood panels throughout the room, painted to reflect Otl Alcher’s colour scheme for the Olympics – calming shades of green, lilac, blue, yellow and orange that Alcher had intended to counteract the memories of the last German Olympics under the Nazi regime in 1936.