Ina Barfuss is among the few West German women painters who has managed to keep a high profile in the Federal Republic since the advent of “New Painting” at the end of the ’70s. Painting in Germany is still a male domain, and the question of why this is so has yet to be satisfactorily answered. Conventional role consciousness is still more widespread in painting than in any other medium. Barfuss’ works specifically address this problem while at the same time reflecting on the more general question of the relationship between the sexes. The artist does not illustrate these relationships but

Endart is a typical West Berlin phenomenon—an artist group that has lived, worked, and exhibited outside the established art world, in Kreuzberg (a sort of Berlin equivalent of New York’s East Village), since 1980. The members of the group reject the conventional notion of the artist as a special individual. Close to the Berlin Wall in a rundown quarter of the city with an unusual population mix —pensioners, students, punks, artists, Turkish workers—Endart owns a “gallery” that changes its name and direction for almost every exhibition. Analogously, they work in all the media—painting, posters,