Exhibition

Tatort Portraits by Ekkehard Vree

Homage to a cult

Vernissage: Friday, December 8, 2023

Exhibition: 8 Dec 2023 to 14 Jan 2024

The painter and illustrator Ekkehard Vree has been an enthusiastic reader of detectice stories and viewer of cinema and TV films of the same genre for many years. Including Tatort – one of the best-known and most popular German-language television series. Just under a year ago, he had the idea of painting portraits of the series’ characters. ‘Hardly any other series brings together as many well-known actors as Tatort – a great source of artistic inspiration,’ says Ekkehard Vree. The Tatort project was born.

His portraits, effortlessly brought on the paper and lyrical as well as characterised by subtle humour, allow the characters of the crime scene to appear in a completely new light. They are convincing, to the point, and at the same time a very personal interpretation of the artist. The pictures invite you to discover the protagonists in an inspiring new way.

At the same time, he asked the actors to write short commentaries on the works that would in one way or another correspond with the portraits, for example personal words, role quotes or lines of poetry. Vree drew over 100 portraits, and 37 Tatort actors and actresses took part in Vree’s project, including Dietmar Bär (Tatort Köln), Lisa Bitter (Tatort Ludwigshafen), Axel Milberg (Tatort Kiel), Martin Brambach (Tatort Dresden) and Fabian Hinrichs (Tatort Franken). Other cast members: Michaela May, Sabine Timoteo, Karl Markovics, Victoria Trauttmansdorff, Proschat Madani, Tristan Seith, Lena Stolze, Jeanette Spassova, Zazie de Paris, Mathilde Bundschuh, Nico Rogner and others.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Artbear Books Berlin.

The artist Ekkehard Vree

Ekkehard Vree is a painter and draughtsman who lives and works in Viernheim in southern Hesse. Born in 1953 in Hildesheim, he studied social pedagogy in Mannheim and educational science in Marburg. At the end of the 1980s, he began to work intensively with painting and ink drawings and his first exhibitions soon followed, including at Nordart, Kunstverein Mainz, Kunstverein Ladenburg and Viernheim, Vilnius Biennial (Lithuania), Kunstforum Forst and several times in Berlin. In 2018, he was awarded the Stollwork Prize for his painterly work.