With Once I Was Older – Johannes Heisig in Dialogue with Wolfgang Hilbig, the Museum Giersch of Goethe University, in cooperation with DIE GALERIE, presents an exhibition that brings literature and painting into a unique dialogue. At its heart is the painter Johannes Heisig’s more than three-decade-long artistic engagement with the work of writer Wolfgang Hilbig.
Wolfgang Hilbig (1941–2007) and Johannes Heisig (*1953) belong to different generations and experienced East Germany from different perspectives. Yet there is a strong connection between their work: themes such as origins, identity and memory, as well as the ruptures in German history, become literature in Hilbig’s work and painting in Heisig’s. Heisig does not illustrate Hilbig’s texts. He reads them, takes up their motifs and moods, and develops from them his own expressive visual language. Literature and painting meet on equal terms.
Johannes Heisig’s engagement with Hilbig’s work began as early as the 1990s. His first series of charcoal drawings inspired by Hilbig is titled Abfahrt and was created in 1995. In his series Bilder vom Erzählen, created in 2020/21, Heisig focused in particular on Wolfgang Hilbig’s novel „Ich“. He now continues this dialogue. The eleven new works from the 2026 series Einst war ich älter – which gives the exhibition its title and are being shown to the public for the first time – once again engage with Hilbig’s literary work, with a particular emphasis on his poetry. Drawing and painting intertwine; areas of colour are reworked, scraped away and exposed again. Shades of grey, brown and black evoke charcoal, soot and ash, while individual colours and golden accents emerge from the dark pictorial spaces.
The exhibition is complemented by photographs, films, books, as well as audio and video documents, offering insights into Hilbig’s life, his origins and the literary landscapes that shaped his writing.
