Gönül Sen-Menzel and the Schwarzbach-Galerie in Wuppertal

About the Gallery

For more than 25 years, the Schwarzbach-Galerie has been an established venue for contemporary art in the east of Wuppertal. Barbara Binner opened it on September 18, 1998, in the rear building of Schwarzbach 174 – in the light-filled halls of her father’s former machine tool business. The gallery takes its name from the street and from the small Schwarzbach stream that flows beneath the building.

Under the motto “Art in the Factory”, the high rooms dating from before 1900, the historic sawtooth roof, old crane installations and concrete floors create an impressive setting for painting, graphic art, sculpture and installation. Daylight falls from above and shows the works in ever-changing light. As the audience grew, the gallery expanded: for its tenth anniversary it added the ground-floor rooms with two large display windows facing the street. Today it offers around 430 square meters of exhibition space.

Since its opening, the gallery has presented around 150 exhibitions with more than 300 artists from Germany and abroad – from Valparaíso in Chile to Yekaterinburg in Russia, and from Aberdeen in Scotland to South Tyrol. Its program includes solo and group exhibitions, the annual winter exhibition with the gallery’s artists, as well as readings and concerts. As early as 2000, the Bürgerforum Oberbarmen highlighted the gallery as a new address for art in the district. In 2023 it celebrated its 25th anniversary with a jubilee exhibition.

Gönül Sen-Menzel at the Schwarzbach-Galerie

2000 – “People – Portraits – Landscapes”
From May 7 to June 1, 2000, Gönül Sen-Menzel opened the gallery’s 2000 exhibition season with a solo show – the fifth exhibition in the gallery’s history. She showed oil paintings, watercolors and drawings: people in flowing movement, critically observed portraits and vividly colored, often large-format landscapes. The culture magazine Erster Rang announced the show under the title “Passion for Color”. In the same year she took part in a live painting performance to oriental dance at the gallery.

2013 – “Gönül’s World”
From February 17 to March 15, 2013, she returned with the major solo exhibition “Gönül’s World”. Some 70 paintings from 2000 to 2012 showed landscapes, people and nature in intense colors, with the circle of the sun as a recurring motif. Jutta Höfel gave the introduction at the opening on Sunday. The artist told the Westdeutsche Zeitung: “This is not abstract – these are all my trees, my landscapes, my world.” It was one of her last major solo exhibitions before her death in March 2014.

Press Coverage about Gönül Sen-Menzel

• “Cheerfulness and Joy in “Gönül’s World”” · Exhibition Report · Westdeutsche Zeitung
• “Color-Intense Works by Gönül Sen-Menzel” · Exhibition Announcement · Westdeutsche Zeitung
• “Welcome to “Gönül’s World”” · Exhibition Notice · Coolibri
• “New Life for an Old Factory” · Report · Wuppertaler Rundschau
• “Passion for Color – Schwarzbach Galerie” · Exhibition Notice · Erster Rang Kulturmagazin
• “Art in the Factory” · Report · Bürgerforum Oberbarmen

All exhibitions at a glance: Exhibitions of Gönül Sen-Menzel