“What is the most embarrassing thing?”

It all began on Cologne's Domplatte. This is where Walter Dahn and Jiří Georg Dokoupil met at the end of the 1970s. The artists, both in their mid-twenties, struck up a conversation during a performance and became friends. Dokoupil, who had come to Germany from Czechoslovakia with his family in 1968, had first studied at the Cologne Werkschule and then spent a year in New York. Back in Cologne, he wanted to ‘change everything’ and found a congenial partner in Dahn, who had already studied with Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf at the age of 17. They spent evenings discussing new ideas in the pub, made short films and created collages inspired by the fanzines of the punk music scene.

Together with two friends, the self-taught artist Peter Bömmels and the painter Hans Peter Adamski, they realised their first exhibition in Cologne's Hahnentorburg in 1980 under the title ‘Auch wenn das Perlhuhn leise weint’ (Even if the guinea fowl cries quietly). All the rooms, including the staircase, became a field for artistic experimentation: Bömmels showed installations made of plasticine figures, Adamski huge paper tears, Dahn and Dokoupil covered the walls with paintings created in a rush. Drawings were scattered across the floor and the audience trampled over them. ‘We thought about it: What is embarrassing? What is the most embarrassing thing? And that's what we did,’ Bömmels recalls years later.

For the renowned Cologne gallery owner Paul Maenz, who at the time mainly represented conceptual artists such as Hanne Darboven and Hans Haacke, this exhibition was ‘a sensation the likes of which I have rarely experienced’. He immediately asked the young artists whether they would exhibit with him: ‘They were coy at first - the gallery was too established for them. But of course they weren't naive and recognised their opportunity.’

The response to the show ‘Mülheimer Freiheit & Interessante Bilder aus Deutschland’ in November 1980 at Galerie Paul Maenz was enormous. This new snotty painting, the supposedly dilettantish, thrown on the wall or canvas in the shortest possible time, a figurative art full of strange flag-bearers, bizarre contortions and heads puking in a stream struck a nerve. The programmatic title ‘Mülheimer Freiheit’ was simply the name of the street in which the artists shared their studio on a factory floor.

Thanks to Paul Maenz's skilful marketing, this studio community became a group of artists who were soon passed around in the media and invited to exhibitions. At the same time, the former factory in Cologne-Mülheim was indeed a place of intensive artistic group work - to the point of breaking down individual boundaries. ‘There was an open system in the hall. You could go there and change something in someone else's work. It was sometimes a brutal affair, but the whole thing had something of an anti-authoritarian children's centre,’ recalls Jiří Georg Dokoupil, who formed the artistic nucleus of the group with Walter Dahn. The two of them made the disappearance of the artist subject their programme - in the spirit of the emerging postmodern era. And from the very beginning, they focussed on painting, in contrast to conceptual art, which was in high demand, and to Beuys, who was the father of the group. Mülheimer Freiheit was part of an art movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s that was soon summarised as ‘Neue Wilde’ and had its centres in Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne. In contrast to the Berliners, who were characterised by the existential hardship and gay subculture of the frontline city, in Cologne it was above all the fun of exuberant productivity that ruled, transcending all artistic boundaries with a shaken degree of unseriousness.

The group's frenzied rise peaked in 1982, when they appeared at prime time on Alfred Biolek and ‘Bio's Bahnhof’, and the entire group was represented in the exhibition ‘10 Young Artists from Germany’ at the Folkwang Museum, as well as shortly afterwards in Wolfsburg, Basel, Bologna, Rotterdam and Berlin. Paul Maenz had signed three of them, Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil and Peter Bömmels, and placed them with the top addresses on the New York gallery scene, Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend and Marian Goodman. Dahn and Dokoupil took part in Documenta 7 in 1982, Dokoupil was represented at the Venice Biennale.

But with success soon came the first signs of dissolution. Walter Dahn moved out of his studio in Mülheim to prepare for the Documenta in peace and quiet. Just a few years later, he gave up painting altogether and dedicated himself to photographic art. Jiří Georg Dokoupil soon moved into a second studio in New York and increasingly became a citizen of the world. Gerard Kever turned to the teachings of Bhagwan. Gerhard Naschberger, who died in a car accident in 2014, withdrew completely from the art scene in the 1990s. Peter Bömmels, a self-taught sociologist, continued to develop his artistic oeuvre alongside his work as editor of the pop culture magazine Spex, as did Hans Peter Adamski.

Posterity does not yet seem to agree on the art-historical status of Mülheimer Freiheit. None of the six have yet experienced the fame of Martin Kippenberger, especially posthumously. The group usually only appears in exhibitions as part of the ‘Neue Wilde’, which outrages gallery owner Michael Haas. Haas, who opened his gallery in Berlin in 1976, had already acquired works by the artists from Paul Maenz in the 1980s. ‘People had had enough of minimal art and conceptual art back then,’ he recalls. ‘They had a real hunger for pictures. And this spirit of optimism in painting was epitomised by Mülheimer Freiheit.’ He particularly appreciates their original, unconventional approach to art: ‘Unlike the young savages from Berlin, they were less neo-expressive, but developed their very own visual language. It was provocative, diverse, cheeky and perhaps best characterised by DADA.’

Michael Haas will be bringing works by all of the group's artists to ART COLOGNE, even if they were not always created within the narrowly defined period of Mülheimer Freiheit's existence. They still harbour the energy of a new beginning: ‘The pictures of Mülheimer Freiheit never get boring. They are just as fascinating today as they were 40 years ago,’ summarises the gallery owner. He finds it all the more astonishing how little the group has been recognised to date. ‘Sometimes you get the impression that other countries are more interested in German art from the 1980s than Cologne's museums - the city where the movement originated.’