Monika Baer: Neue Bilder / Natascha Sadr Haghighian: passing one loop into another

Monika Baer. Neue Bilder
Hannah Höch Prize 2020
June 12–August 2, 2020
Curator: Marius Babias

Monika Baer was awarded the Hannah Höch Prize 2020 by the State of Berlin for her outstanding artistic achievements. On the occasion of the award ceremony, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) will honor her complex artistic oeuvre with a solo exhibition. This first larger presentation of Baer’s work at an institution in Berlin offers insights into her most recent experimental approaches, begun last year in Los Angeles. With a new constellation of large-format paintings and small-format collages, Baer continues her investigation of art historical references as well as the new discursive spaces that painted images can produce.

In her work, often produced as series, Baer makes use of various painterly traditions and techniques, from monochrome and representational approaches to physical disruption to the surface of the canvas. During her studies in the 1980s, art was undergoing a period of repoliticization, in which art criticism questioned the autonomy of painting and its potential for innovation. Amidst this set of conflicts, Baer made the conscious decision to work within the medium of painting—with an interest in continuing the scrutiny of its underlying presumptions—which has remained one of her central artistic questions to this day.

Baer’s painting is guided by an understanding of the painting as a stage, and the pursuit of a choreography of seeing imbued with cultural history. Her latest works, presented at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, continue her exploration of the pictorial space as a theater setting, which she began in 1995. Walls structure the foreground and background to place them in perspective, evoking stone parapets and borders, as found in Renaissance portrait painting. The protagonists are trees and tree stumps, which move diagonally against a magnificent colorful sky, tilting or shedding their bark. The repetition of compositional elements and angles of inclination indicate the artist’s concern, not with illusionary effects, but with the concrete object as an embodiment to be explored in its specific, metonymic form and as part of a performance.


Exhibition talks

Thursday, June 25, 2020, 7pm
Monika Baer and Tonio Kröner (Artist, Berlin)
In German

Thursday, July 9, 2020, 7pm
Monika Baer, Griselda Pollock (Art historian, University of Leeds), and Susanne Leeb (Art historian, professor for Contemporary Art, Leuphana University Lüneburg)
In English

Thursday, July 23, 2020, 7pm
Monika Baer and Kerstin Stakemeier (Professor for Art Education, Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg)
In German

All events take place with a limited number of participants, please register online on www.nbk.org


Publication
Accompanying the exhibition, upon Monika Baer’s initiative the first German-language edition of the essay “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” (1988) by Griselda Pollock, a pioneer of feminist art history and theory, will be published in the series n.b.k. Diskurs. In her examination of the artistic practice of women Impressionist painters, Pollock offers a brilliant analysis of class and gender relations since the end of the 19th century whose effects can be felt to this day. Moderne und die Räume der Weiblichkeit, the title of the German edition, will be published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König in Cologne, in a revised and extensively commented version with a foreword by Klaus Lederer and Marius Babias and an introduction by Griselda Pollock.



n.b.k. Showroom
Natascha Sadr Haghighian. passing one loop into another
Hannah Höch Advancement Award 2020
June 12–July 31, 2020
Curator: Anna Lena Seiser

Natascha Sadr Haghighian develops installations, video and audio works, as well as performative interventions which reveal the infrastructures and conditions of our social order. Taking current and historical events as a point of departure, the artist addresses how our scope of action, structure of the gaze, and ultimately our thinking are formed. She shows the complex interdependencies and the mutual interpenetration of technology, politics, systems of value creation, and the biological, and calls into question our anthropocentric self-understanding.

In 2020 Sadr Haghighian was honored by the State of Berlin with the Hannah Höch Advancement Award for outstanding artistic achievements by mid-career artists. On the occasion of her award, the artist is presenting a series of works in the Showroom of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) in which diverse thematic strands are interwoven in the figure of an animal. The central installation, passing one loop into another (2017) focuses on the Asian tiger mosquito. Originating in the subtropical regions of Southeast Asia, the insect was discovered to be a carrier of pathogens and diseases such as the Zika virus. The tiger mosquito was first sighted in Italy in the early 1990s, a time marked by increasing global warming as well as the ratification of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) on the deregulation of world trade. To protect themselves from the mosquito, the Italians developed a novel alliance with the native Pippistrellus, a microbat that feeds on insects. The installation shows a larger-than-life model of the tiger mosquito enthroned above a pallet loaded with industrial yarn reels. The yarn comes from the town of Prato, northwest of Florence, a center of the globalized textile industry. Above the insect, resound echolocation hunting calls by the nocturnal pipistrelli, lowered to frequencies audible to humans.

The title, passing one loop into another represents an instructional step for making string figures, a cultural technique used worldwide, in which a looped string is linked with the hands via several, algorithmically describable intermediate steps to form an image or geometric figure.

Publication
On the occasion of the exhibition at n.b.k., an extensive catalogue will be published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne.