The Spring of Discontent

The exhibition entitled “The Spring of Discontent” by Michael Ruetz has been conceptualised as a photographic journal about the 1968 movement. The photographs not only provide a unique travel through history but also reveal a day-by-day course of an epoch of profound change. Consisting of 102 photographs, “The Spring of Discontent” showed the leading political and cultural figures of the period, from Willy Brandt to Joseph Beuys, as well as the breaking line between dictatorship and democratic development: in West and East Berlin, in Portugal, in Chile, Greece and on the continent of Africa.

Member of the Stern editorial in Hamburg from 1969 until 1973, Ruetz was a contracted author of the publishers Little, Brown & Co and New York Graphic Society, Boston from 1981 until 1991 and professor of Communication Design at the Braunschweig University of Art from 1981 until 2005. In 2002, Ruetz organised Heinz Hajek-Halke’s extensive retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Among others, Michael Ruetz was awarded the Otto Steinert Prize and the Villa Massimo Prize, and appointed a member of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Since 1998 Michael Ruetz is a member of the Akademie der Künste.