Neue Sachlichkeit

"I have to paint you! I have to!"

That's what Otto Dix said to Sylvia von Harden when he met her on the street. "You represent an entire era!" The "New Woman" of the 1920s had rid her wardrobe of the heavy clothes that weighed down her mothers' generation, replaced them with a cigarette and a perky bob - and had already become her own myth. This flâneuse, who looked for the latest coat or her own reflection in the department stores' windows, quickly became the epitome of consumerism and vanity. Even though the artistic and literary movement of the time, the New Objectivity, turned its disillusioned, post-avant-garde gaze on 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 more of a cliché than a reflection of everyday female life. This ossified iconography, largely created by the media, was scrutinised and explored in its many facets by female 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. Nevertheless, until recently most of them were forgotten, ignored by art history. 100 years later, much has changed, but much has also remained the same. The impetus for this exhibition came from the perception of a global glut of figurative painting in recent years. In the midst of the omnipresent phenomena of digital imagery, the contemporary artists in this exhibition revisit the concepts of objectivity and factuality through their different perceptions of figuration and representation. In a time when the flâneuse no longer exists and the scrolluse takes its place - in which the world unfolds beneath our fingertips - the real and the surreal are inevitably intermingled.

Female 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