THEO VON BROCKHUSEN, Potsdam Museum - Potsdam

INTRO

In 1925 the gallerist Ferdinand Möller organised a posthumous solo exhibition of Theo von Brockhusen in Potsdam. A hundred years later the Potsdam Museum's 2025/26 exhibition “Theo von Brockhusen. Farben im Licht” brought the painter back to the city, and for it Xenorama made an AI animation of his paintings, shown on a screen in the exhibition.

Brockhusen (1882–1919) trained at the Königsberg Academy and painted his best-known landscapes at the Schwielowsee near Geltow. In 1904 he moved to Berlin, where he joined the Berlin Secession alongside Walter Leistikow and Max Liebermann. He died at 36.

Key challenges

Animating paintings without losing the painter

Transitions between separate works

A moving image among originals

LIGHT AND ATMOSPHERE

“Light and atmosphere stand at the center of his work and mark him as a defining representative of the Berlin and Free Secession,” says curator Hendrikje Warmt.

Xenorama's contribution took up that light. Using AI, the collective animated Brockhusen's painted works and linked them with transitions, so that one landscape flows into the next. The animation ran on a screen inside the exhibition; the stills on this page are frames from it.

The exhibition, subtitled “Künstler des deutschen Impressionismus”, ran from 22 November 2025 to 22 March 2026 on two floors. One was devoted to Brockhusen himself with 49 paintings and drawings; the other showed 46 works by contemporaries including Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Liebermann and Karl Hagemeister, together with 19 documents and photographs. Loans came from the Berlinische Galerie, the Buchheim Museum and many private collections. Together they traced the Berlin–Potsdam–Havelland network of German Impressionism around 1900, in the first comprehensive Brockhusen retrospective in more than 30 years (Potsdam Museum).