»I must paint you! I simply must!«

This said Otto Dix to Sylvia von Harden when he ran into her on the street. »You are representative of an entire epoch!« Clearing out her closet of the heavy dresses that burdened her mother’s generation and replacing them with a cigarette and a perky bob, the »New Woman« of the 1920s had become a myth of its own. The famed flâneuse, gazing at displays in department store windows, be it for the newest coat or her own reflection, she quickly became the image of consumerism and vanity. Even though the artistic and literary movement of the time, New Objectivity, had turned its disillusioned, post-avantgarde eye toward the everyday political and social conditions in the Weimar Republic and its back on sentimentality and inwardness as championed by Expressionism, the image of the »New Woman« remained a cliché rather than a reflection of women’s everyday lives. This frozen iconography, largely created by the media, was being challenged and explored in her many facets by the female artists and writers of the time. Until recently, many of them have been half-forgotten. Without question, the »New Woman« of the Weimar Republic didn’t exist, but there were plenty of new women. Fast forward a hundred years and a lot has changed, but a lot hasn’t. Amidst the all-pervasiveness of digital image phenomena, contemporary artists gathered in this exhibition revisit the notions of objectivity and facticity through their distinct takes on figuration and representation. Indeed, in a time when the flâneuse is no more and the scrolleuse takes her place, as the world unfolds at our fingertips, the real and the surreal are bound to get mixed up.

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