Monika BrandmeierEine tropische Stimmung, nur um einiges kühler

During the early 1980s a postmodern plurality of perspectives took hold which, on the one hand, no longer found any consensus in matters of taste, as Jean-François Lyotard remarked, but on the other offered an increasing diversity of styles and ways of life. It is under these auspices that Monika Brandmeier begins her artistic work, which sets itself apart from her young, wild contemporaries through strangely enigmatic and sensitive tones. She works with language as a source of inspiration and as a medium of expression and arrives at a predominantly geometric formal idiom which she always also seeks to charge semantically beyond mere materiality. “She,” writes Christian Ganzenberg in his contribution, “who relies not on physical and emotional immersion but on the viewer’s intellectual and physical distance from the artwork, discovers in the intersection of abstraction and concretion the personal point of departure for pursuing reductionist and surrealist tendencies as well as a sensual and intellectual engagement with space and language. Her works unfold beyond the severity and calculated understatement of a rational artistic practice; again and again they are permeated by an enigmatic wit such as we also find in the machine texts of Francis Picabia, in the linguistic and typographic experiments of a Gertrude Stein or a Friederike Mayröcker, and also in the poems of Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann.”

Exhibition:
Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, 22/9 – 17/11/2019
Zentrum Aktuelle Kunst Zitadelle Spandau, 12/6 – 19/9/2021