Monica Bonvicini: LOVER’S MATERIAL

The Kunsthalle Bielefeld is pleased to present the solo exhibition LOVER’S MATERIAL by Monica Bonvicini. It is the first exhibition organized by recently appointed Kunsthalle’s director Christina Végh. Spanning across the entire first floor of the museum, LOVER’S MATERIAL includes the most recent works by the artist, some created specifically for the exhibition in Bielefeld.

The exhibition’s title refers to the biography of the museum’s architect Philip Johnson, namely to the relationship between him and his partner Jon Stroup. Johnson’s biographer Franz Schulze described Stroup as “unfailingly affectionate, comfortably passive, and forever appreciative of his lover’s material generosity”. This nuanced description of the power imbalance between the two lovers triggered Bonvicini’s inquiry into various private and public, political and economic entanglements within and outside art exhibition spaces. With her archetypical humor and criticality, the artist installed pairings and larger compositions of works to reflect upon contemporary, essentially 2020’s topics: spaces that we live in and that we domesticate, and care, personal and societal, towards those with whom we share these spaces. The exhibition’s rooms present various narratives and choreographies composed of images, sculptural works and architectural interventions, as if each space embarks a different chapter of a story. The exhibition in its entirety is brought together through sounds and light that travel through the rather rigid, modernist museum’s architecture, simultaneously offering both familiarization with and estrangement from the main story-line.

In the exhibition’s central room, Bonvicini has laid down Breach of Decor, a large-scale composition of carpets covering up most of the floor. The work carefully assembles images of a photographic series that the artist took over a long period of time. The images double the visitors’ point of view from above; they depict fragments of different kinds of flooring with lying garments. Walking on the work and exploring familiar interior scenes of daily life, the audience finds itself in ambivalent vertigo of visual perspective and ironic détournement.

In the adjacent room, a wall installation NEVER TIRE consists of paintings that Bonvicini made during the lockdown period. The installation creates a nebulous black, dark grey and pink landscape from which fence mesh, chains and text lines appear. In contrast to the indefinite background, the text lines strike startlingly real and present. The artist sprayed quotes from works by Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Natalie Diaz, Soraya Chemaly and Andrea Dworkin. The text passages are reversed, cut shorter and changed, attaining a new, poetic dimension: “Weep Me Crude,” “Power Joy Humor & Resistance,” “I Never Tire.” The works on paper are mounted on vertical aluminum panels with visible metal edges and are thus akin to banners used in political protests, manifesting polyvocality of slogans, demands and messages. Instant associations that the work brings up are simultaneously personal, but also political and contemporary.

Other new works presented in LOVER’S MATERIAL include a video piece and a site-specific installation. The video work I See a White Building, Pink and Blue is an abstract rendition of a vernal ride to the artist’s studio during the lockdown time. The abstract, light-flashing and loud sequence induces nearly hallucinative physical effect on the visitors. A site-specific installation contains an aluminium wall, partly polished to a mirror surface, that will be activated by the museum staff through the exhibition’s period. The aluminum surface will be polished daily to keep the separation between clear and matt surfaces of the same material, one providing a mirror-like reflection, the other subsuming the visitors into the ghostly-like blurred haze. Titled Be Your Mirror, the work metaphorically disputes the idea of cleaning within the psychological and societal contexts.

The exhibited works significantly vary in scale, smaller sculptural interventions almost blending in the museum’s interior. The exhibition rooms become re-domesticated by the artist, and the clean, pristine museum’s infrastructure is aesthetically deconstructed through various objects of unusual, almost abject decor. As such, LOVER’S MATERIAL interrogates our spaces of comfort and isolation that we grew more accustomed to this year. The messages that the artist eloquently communicates with her installations seek to subvert the current social stupefaction towards urging and often shocking events that the global society faces.

Monica Bonvicini is the recipient of prestigious international art prizes, such as the Golden Lion from the Venice Biennale (1999), the Nationalgalerie Prize, Berlin (2005), and more recently the Oskar Kokoschka Prize (2020). Her works have been presented at several Venice, Istanbul and Berlin Biennials, and this fall they will be on display at the Busan Biennial, Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf, at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Aside from the numerous appearances of her art in national and international group shows, comprehensive shows of her artworks have been seen at BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art (2016), the Berlinische Galerie (2017), Belvedere 21 in Vienna (2019) and the OGR (Officine Grandi Riparazioni), Turin (2019). A solo show at the Kunst Museum Winterthur will open in January 2021.