Monika Brandmeier: A Tropical Mood, Only a lot Cooler

Cat. Kunsthalle Recklinghause, ZAK Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst, Zitadelle Berlin

Exhibition catalogue, texts (German/English) by Christian Ganzenberg, Ludwig Seyfarth
176 p with 140 coloured illustrations
220 x 320 mm, softcover with flaps

ISBN 978-3-86442-369-7

48,00 €

Vague, but precise

A plurality of perspectives of postmodernism prevailed during the early 1980s, which on the one hand no longer reached a consensus in terms of taste, as observed by Jean-François Lyotard, but on the other hand did offer an ever-increasing diver­sity of styles and ways of life. It is under these aus­pices that Monika Brandmeier begins her artistic work, which is set apart from her young, wild contemporaries by strangely enigmatic and sensitive tones. She works with language as a source of inspiration and a medium of expression, arriving at a predominantly geometric language of forms, which she invariably seeks to charge semantically beyond mere materiality. Christian Ganzenberg writes in his text contribution that »instead of physical and emotional immersion, she relies on the viewer’s intellectual and physical distance from the artwork, and discovers in the intersection of abstraction and concretion a personal starting point for pursuing reductionist and surrealist tendencies, as well as a sensuous-intellectual examination of space and language. Her works unfold beyond the rigor and calculated understatement of rational art prac­tice; time and again, they are imbued with a cryptic wit, such as can be found in the machine texts by Francis Picabia, the linguistic-typographical experi­ments of Gertrude Stein, and of Friederike May­röcker, as well as Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann’s poems.«