Monika Brandmeier: Eine tropische Stimmung, nur um einiges kühler

Imprecise, but determined

During the early 1980s, a plurality of perspectives of postmodernism prevailed, which on the one hand no longer found a consensus of taste, as Jean-François Lyotard noted, but on the other hand offered an increasing diversity of styles and lifestyles. Monika Brandmeier began her artistic work under these auspices, setting herself apart from her young, wild contemporaries with strangely enigmatic and sensitive tones. She works with language as a source of inspiration and medium of expression and arrives at a primarily geometric formal language, which she always attempts to charge semantically beyond pure materiality. "She," writes Christian Ganzenberg in his text contribution, "who instead of focussing on physical and emotional immersion relies on the viewer's intellectual and physical distance from the artwork, discovers in the intersection of abstraction and concretion the personal starting point for pursuing reductionist and surrealist tendencies as well as a sensual-intellectual examination of space and language. Her works unfold beyond the rigour and calculated understatement of a rational art practice; they are always imbued with a subtle wit, as we also find in the machine texts of Francis Picabia, the linguistic-typographical experiments of Gertrude Stein or Friederike Mayröcker and the poems of Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann."

Exhibition:
Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, 22/9 - 17/11/2019
Centre for Contemporary Art Zitadelle Spandau, 12/6 - 19/9/2021