The exhibition is dedicated to the œuvre of the artist Ruth Baumgarte (1923–2013), which evolved over more than seven decades, and for the first time places it in a multifaceted dialogue with modern and contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora.
At its centre is not merely the encounter between different geographical perspectives, but rather a shared engagement with existential questions of identity, memory, community, spirituality, and social transformation.
In this exhibition, Baumgarte’s work emerges as an open, profoundly humanist visual language — shaped by empathy, observation, and an extraordinary sensitivity towards the other.
From early drawings of the war and post-war years, through socially engaged bodies of work, to the intensely coloured compositions of her Africa Cycle, an artistic development unfolds that is sustained by inner vigilance and cultural openness.
Ruth Baumgarte’s works are brought into dialogue with significant positions in modern and contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora — not in an illustrative manner, but dialogically: as independent voices within a vibrant, transcultural exchange.

The selected artistic positions address questions of memory, origin and the present, as well as the spiritual, social and political dimensions of human existence. Figuration, line, signs, script and material do not appear merely as isolated formal devices, but as carriers of condensed meaning. They bring oral and mythological narrative traditions, Indigenous visual languages, colonial experiences and contemporary reflections into an open visual exchange.
It is precisely within this field of tension that the exhibition gains its particular expressive force. Baumgarte’s quiet, deeply human-centred pictorial worlds encounter the multifaceted artistic voices of the Iwalewahaus Collection not in the sense of comparison, but as part of a shared conversation about dignity, memory, vulnerability and hope. In this way, a dialogical exhibition space emerges, making African modernism and contemporary art visible as autonomous and formative contributions to a globally conceived history of art.

The title Ayeye! — a joyful exclamation found in West African linguistic cultures — forms the poetic guiding idea of the exhibition. It stands for community, dignity and an affirmative attitude towards the human being. In dialogue with the multilayered works from the Iwalewahaus Collection, Ruth Baumgarte’s works unfold their quiet intensity as part of a larger visual conversation: about memory and hope, cultural identity and the universal power of art.

A 128-page catalogue with around 80 illustrations, published in German and English by Hirmer Verlag, accompanies the exhibition.

In recent years, numerous exhibitions devoted to the work of Ruth Baumgarte have been presented both in Germany and internationally. Major presentations include exhibitions at the State Russian Museum / Ludwig Foundation in the Marble Palace, St Petersburg, as well as the major retrospective held at the Albertina in Vienna on the occasion of the artist’s centenary in 2022/23. Curated by Angela Stief, Director of the Albertina Modern, the exhibition dedicated to the artist’s Africa Cycle attracted more than 200,000 visitors.

To the publications