Neue Sachlichkeit

“I must paint you! I must!” This is what Otto Dix said to Sylvia von Harden when he met her in the street. „You represent an entire epoch!” The “New Woman” of the 1920s had freed her wardrobe of the heavy dresses that had weighed down the generation of her mothers, replacing them with a cigarette and a jaunty bob – and had already become her own myth. This flâneuse, who scanned the shop windows of the department stores for the latest coat or for her own reflection, swiftly became the epitome of consumption and vanity. Even though the artistic and literary movement of the time, Neue Sachlichkeit, directed its disillusioned, post-avant-garde gaze at the everyday political and social conditions of the Weimar Republic and turned its back on the sentimentality and inwardness represented by Expressionism, the image of the „New Woman“ remained a cliché rather than a reflection of women’s everyday lives. This rigid iconography, largely created by the media, was questioned and explored in its many facets by the women artists and writers of the time. Without question, “the New Woman of the Weimar Republic did not exist, but there were plenty of New Women.” Yet until recently most of them were forgotten, ignored by art history. One hundred years later much has changed, but much has also stayed the same. The impulse for this exhibition came from the perception of a global flood of figurative painting in recent years. Amid the omnipresent phenomena of digital image worlds, the contemporary women artists in this exhibition take up the concepts of objectivity and facticity anew through their differing conceptions of figuration and representation. In an age in which the flâneuse no longer exists and the scrolleuse takes her place – in which the world unfolds beneath our fingertips – the real and the surreal are inevitably intermingled.

Artists:
Jagoda Bednarski, Genesis Belanger, Ellen Berkenblit, Francesca Facciola, Tanya Merrill, Sophie Reinhold, Dana Schutz, Katja Seib, Emily Mae Smith

Exhibition:
CFA Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin, 10/6 – 17/7/2021