THE GALLERIST
series: "The East Germans - 25 Paths into a New Land"
Author & Director:Juergen Ast | Manuela Martinson
Commissioning Editors:Rolf Bergmann | Jens Stubenrauch
Duration:15'
Internet:
Coproduction:credo:film | RBB | funded by Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg and with means of the Federal Foundation for the reappraise of the SED-Dictatorship
The collapse of the East German system, that some West Germans only experienced as kind of a side-show, for the former East Germans it was a sudden and dramatic change, a fundamental reorientation at work, at home. But it was also a big chance: traveling, career, happiness. How can one make the mental change of a group visible? Let individuals tell their very personal story, back at that moment in time, when everything changed. 25 paths of life, every story as a part of the "big picture". What has become of them, and what has remained? The German Democratic Republic is gone, the memories stay.
The episode "The Gallerist" tells the story of Gerd Harry Lybke from Leipzig. With his gallery EIGEN+ART, he wrote part of the East German art history, and today, he is one of the most important German gallerists worldwide. "For ever-lasting", "worldwide fame", "creating a myth" - Gerd Harry Lybke, or Judy, as his friends call him, had never dealt with less than superlatives. Not during the years in the East, not in the first years after the German reunification, and certainly not today. "I always stayed the one I used to be, and at once I invented myself again and again." For Lybke, the fall of the Berlin Wall was not an end, but one more page to be turned.
Gerd Harry Lybke regards his enterprise as kind of a "family business". For him it is important that the artists and the staff "belong together", the human factor is important. With inexhaustible energy, he is constantly in search of a new challenge. He was, and he is a phenomenon, called many names. He regards himself more as a go-between, a "ferry captain for artists". But he regards himself also as a "vampire that nourishes himself on the universe of the artists, by living with them their life." The path of an East German - the gallerist Gerd Harry Lybke.
