THE work of two artists who escaped from Nazi Germany will be put on display in a special exhibition in the Lake District.

The works of Gustav Metzger and Kurt Schwitters will be installed at the Merz Barn, Elterwater.

Metzger's work, who passed away in 2017, includes Rubbish Bag and Dancing Tubes.

The exhibition is also on the same site of Kurt Schwitters’ last work.

Despite never meeting, Metzger held a great respect for Schwitters and took him as a great inspiration.

Both men escaped Germany during the rise to power of Hitler during the 1930s.

Schwitters arrived in Britain aged 53 in 1940 while Metzger came on the Kindertransport in 1939, aged 13.

Both their lives and work were profoundly impacted by the experience of exile, crisis and loss, and both were hugely influential in shaping the course of post-war British art.

Schwitters spent his last years in the Lake District, where he began to create what he regarded as his most important work – the Merzbarn.

He completed one wall which is now housed at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Later in life he struggled with poverty and illness during this time.

Over the course of less than 3 years he created over 540 works, consolidating and refining innovative modes of working and key themes which included a deep-rooted engagement with nature as part of a holistic ‘Merz’ weltanschauung – world view.

Metzger’s life and art reflected an equally rigorous set of artistic and ethical principles which stemmed from concerns over the ultimately self-destructive aspects of humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

He worked across disciplines, developed hybrid art forms and deployed chance or natural processes alongside the latest technology as part of an expansive, experimental envisioning of the role of art and artists in society.

The exhibition establishes a conversation between these two artists and their pioneering artistic practices.

Ian Hunter the director of Littoral Arts which owns the Cylinders Estate, the site of the Merz Barn, said: “The presentation of these two particular works, which bookend the development of Metzger’s radical aesthetic theories, highlights specific confluences between the material and aesthetic sensibilities of Gustav Metzger and Kurt Schwitters by way of opening up the rich and largely unexplored common ground between the two.

Barrow Curator Lizzie Fisher, from Leverhulme Research Fellow at Northumbria University, said: “I believe that he recognised that they shared the experience of exile and while both rejected German citizenship after the war, they nevertheless carried with them a sense of a shared, specifically German artistic and intellectual heritage.

“Metzger first saw Schwitters’ work in 1958 at a show at Lord’s Gallery in London, and Metzger’s aesthetic theories owe a clear debt to Schwitters’ interest in using what other people regarded as rubbish to make art.”

The exhibition is being launched on Saturday, October 9. It is supported by the Gustav Metzger Foundation, Littoral Trust and Westmorland Arts Trust.