Review of Painter. Mentor. Magician. Otto Mueller and his Network in Wrocław at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin

15/01/19

Painter. Mentor. Magician. Otto Mueller and his Network in Wrocław

Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin

12 October 2018 – 3 March 2019 

and

Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu

8 April – 30 June 2019

Otto Mueller was born in 1874 in Silesia – then a part of Germany, now a part of Poland. From 1907 to 1919, he lived in Berlin, where, from 1910 until its dissolution in 1913, he was a member of the group of expressionist artists known as Die Brücke. In 1919, Mueller moved to Wrocław (then Breslau), where he taught at the State Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts – deemed to be “the liveliest in Germany” in the 1920s – for more than a decade, until his death in 1930. This exhibition, which shows first at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin before travelling to the Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu, is the outcome of a German-Polish research project, and explores the life and work of Mueller, considering him in the roles of painter, mentor and magician, but it simultaneously celebrates the lively exchange between the two cities up to the end of the second world war – and, indeed, beyond. This is done in part through the contextualising of Mueller’s work alongside that of his contemporaries – from the Bauhaus, der Sturm, and the myriad other movements and schools thriving in the early 1900s – but also by the inclusion of so-called “guest exhibits”, spotlighting works of Polish expressionism and neo-impressionism.

Read the full review here

Review of Lotte Laserstein: Face to Face at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt

19/11/18

Lotte Laserstein: Face to Face

Städel Museum, Frankfurt
19 September 2018 – 17 March 2019

Face to face. An appropriate title for an exhibition so largely comprised of portraits – among them a large proportion of self-portraits. For, surrounded by these canvases of Lotte Laserstein (1898-1993), one feels beset by myriad pairs of eyes. She is usually categorised as an artist of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), alongside her male contemporaries Otto Dix, George Grosz and Christian Schad, but her style is really quite different from theirs – devoid of political satire and containing far more empathy, intimacy, and, dare I say it at the risk of sounding disingenuous, femininity. 

Laserstein grew up in a very female environment, with her mother, her sister, Käte, and her aunt and grandmother, following the death of her father in 1902. Fortunately, there was enough family money for both daughters to study and Laserstein was one of the first generation of women accepted into the Berlin Art Academy, in 1921 – two large charcoal drawings of male nudes evidence that she also attended life classes while there. Bear in mind that she was painting at the same time as, for example, the artists of the expressionist group, Die Brücke, and her style might seem a little old fashioned and venerating of art history – “more academy than avant garde”, as Kolja Reichert wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (23 September 2018). One hypothesis put forward by the exhibition texts is that, belonging to this first generation of educated female artists, she lacked the rebellious streak of many of her male contemporaries, wishing instead to prove her technical ability. Vermeer, for example, was one artist she openly declared to be a great influence on her, and aspects of the Dutch master’s style can be detected, especially, perhaps, in her choice of palette.

Read the full review here

Review of Jeanne Mammen: The Observer. Retrospective (1910-75) at the Berlinische Galerie

17/12/17

Jeanne Mammen: The Observer. Retrospective (1910-75)

Berlinische Galerie, Berlin
6 October 2017 – 15 January 2018

Outside the sphere of art historians, Gertrud Johanna Louise Mammen, known as Jeanne, is not a well-known name – not in Germany and certainly not in the rest of the world. Yet her output was prodigious, as the current retrospective at the Berlinische Galerie amply demonstrates. She was born in Germany in 1890, but her family moved to Paris where she enjoyed a carefree and progressive upbringing (including art studies at the Académie Julian, as well as at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels). In 1914, she returned to Germany and, from 1919, worked from a small fourth-floor, two-room living-quarters-cum-studio at Kurfürstendamm 29 in Berlin for more than 60 years, until her death in 1976.

During her lifetime, she gained a reputation beyond Berlin as a chronicler of life in the city, providing for herself largely by designing film posters for the then booming UFA studios and selling her illustrations to fashion and satirical magazines, including Simplicissimus, Uhu and Jugend. Especially during the 20s and 30s, when out and about, she was never without her sketchbook – several of which are included in the exhibition – capturing the goings-on in cafes, bars and on the streets. Her graphic work from this era might be likened to the new objectivity of Otto Dix or George Grosz, but whereas their works tend towards the satirical, with an underlying political critique, expressing pity or disdain for their subjects, Mammen’s drawings and watercolours, while still often employing grimace and caricature, are far more empathetic and, dare I say it, feminine, imbued with emotion, both of her own, as onlooker, and of the relationships between those depicted. The titles are often almost conversational, as, for example, You Have Beautiful Hands (c1929), depicting a chatty scene at a manicurist.

Read the full review here

Portfolio: Jeanne Mammen

23/01/15

Portfolio: Jeanne Mammen

“I have always wanted to be just a pair of eyes, walking through the world unseen, only to be able to see others.”

Born in Berlin, brought up in the well-to-do Parisian suburb of Passy, and educated in art in Paris, Brussels and Rome, German painter and graphic artist Jeanne Mammen (1890-1976) returned to Berlin in her mid-twenties, where she set up a small studio at Kurfürstendamm 29. She lived and worked here for over 50 years, providing for herself by selling her illustrations to fashion and satirical magazines. She was never without her sketchbook and especially liked to draw women, whom she portrayed in a gentle and understanding way, poignantly depicting them in their social background.

Further information about Jeanne Mammen can be obtained at the website www.jeanne-mammen.de, or contact Cornelia Pastelak-Price at the Förderverein of the Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V., e-mail: cornpaprice@gmx.net

To read the rest of this portfolio and to enjoy the images, please see the February 2015 print issue of DIVA magazine

Interview with Jonas Burgert

05/01/15

Interview with Jonas Burgert

Also published in issue 16 of State magazine, winter 2014/15

Interview with Jonas Burgert at Blain | Southern

20/10/14

Jonas Burgert: Stück, Hirn, Blind

Blain | Southern, London Hanover Square

14 October - 22 November 2014

Down the road from London’s Royal Academy, where the German painter Anselm Kiefer is currently wow-ing the public with his epic paintings on a very grand scale, another, younger, German painter is on show.

Blain | Southern gallery shows Jonas Burgert. Born in Berlin in 1969, he also works on a scale that shocks and surprises. 

But are works on this scale purely the province of museums and the private collectors with foundations of their own? Just who could house a painting like these with their overwhelming power and dominating presence…

To watch this interview, please go to: http://www.state-media.com/state/index.php?q=videos/jonas%20burgert

Past, Present, Future: Photography in Berlin

As published in issue 15 of State/F22 (Sept/Oct 2014)

Review of Chiharu Shiota: Dialogues at the New Art Gallery, Walsall

27/02/14

Chiharu Shiota: Dialogues

New Art Gallery, Walsall

17 January – 30 March 2014

Anyone who hasn’t yet heard of Chiharu Shiota soon will have done. Taught by Marina Abramović and influenced to such an extent by Ana Mendieta that she believed herself to be an incarnation of the tragic Cuban, her ethereal installations blend Lygia Clark with Christian Boltanski, innocence with experiences of trauma, unbearable weight with the lightness of being. Born in Japan in 1972, Shiota has been based in Germany since crossing the globe in 1996 to study under Abramović, initially at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig, and latterly at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, where she has been based ever since. “It’s a funny story,” Shiota explains. “I wanted to study with the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz. I got their names mixed up, but Marina accepted me anyway, and I began my life in Germany.” A fortunate mistake, it would seem, for Abramović clearly taught Shiota a lot about the power of the body in art, the value of duration in performance and the suggestive possibility of absent presence.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/chiharu-shiota-dialogues