ART/WORKS: Work and Workshop in the Middle Ages

What the exhibition is about

At its centre is the work of artists and craftspeople in medieval Dortmund and the surrounding region. Two kinds of source lead there: written records setting down recipes and workshop routines, and surviving objects in which the work itself can still be read — tool marks, corrections, signatures.

Two objects from Dortmund

Two pieces stand for this way of looking:

• The baptismal font in St. Reinoldi, cast by Johann Winnenbrock. The bell founder did not leave his work anonymous.
• The gradual of Elisabeth von Lünen in the archive of the Propsteikirche, a liturgical choir book whose scribe becomes tangible in the handwriting.

In both, the traces of work and the masters’ own statements about themselves can be read.

Grown out of two seminars

The exhibition is the result of two seminars at the Seminar für Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft of TU Dortmund. Students examined concrete working routines and craft knowledge there and developed the concept from it. The guiding questions: how can medieval workshop knowledge be reconstructed today? Which materials and tools were needed, and where did they come from? Did a single master’s hand do the work, or a workshop as a collective? And what part did gender and social standing play in artistic production before 1500?

The concept, designed by students, presents these questions at stations that can be experienced through the senses.

Where craft ends and art begins

The division between “craft” and “art” is not a medieval one but an invention of the Renaissance — and it still shapes how people who make art are perceived. The exhibition asks where exactly the line runs between skilled making and “high” art, and how much social and material conditions have to do with that classification. Works from Dortmund are placed in a context that has lost none of its currency: work.