Cosima von Bonin: feelings

From March 21 to June 9, 2024, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is showing a unique presentation of the oeuvre of Cosima von Bonin (b. 1962), for which the artist has combined recent works that have never been shown in Germany with well-known pieces. Cosima von Bonin creates transformations of the everyday. For her expansive exhibitions, she draws on numerous references from popular culture, as well as from film, fashion, music, and art. Cosima von Bonin brings various players together—exhausted cuddly toys, rockets, soft fences, or comic figures like Daffy Duck and Bambi—to form an ensemble, or a community of social connections. Her artistic strategies are alienation, appropriation, collaboration, and delegation.

Sebastian Baden, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, emphasizes: “Colorful and cheerful at first glance, Cosima von Bonin’s art explores nuances, contrasts, and chasms on closer inspection. For her large solo exhibition at the Schirn, the artist has created a parcours of ambiguous humor with her latest works. Employing artistic strategies such as appropriation, exaggeration, and a pointed play with words and images, she brings together numerous references, memories, and experiences to create emotions, ‘feelings’.”

Around seventy works are on display, including sculptures, installations, and a selection of her distinctive textile canvases, which were sewn together from a variety of fabrics in accordance with the artist’s instructions. Her installations, which initially appear to be colorful and fun, manifest unsettling moments upon closer observation and can evoke conflicting emotions. Oscillating between humor and darkness, playfulness and urgency, fantasy and terrifying reality, the artist is always concerned with contradiction, relationship, and self-reflection.

Katharina Dohm, curator of the exhibition, states of the artist: “In her installations, Cosima von Bonin stages cute appearances, catastrophic scenes, and pleasant failure. Her figures and sculptures come together to form social communities that engage in dialogue, comment on each other, and lead us astray. As an artist, she steps into the background of her works. She breaks with the traditional idea of being the lone creative genius and instead collectively joins forces with others: ‘We are many.’ She consciously celebrates exhaustion and inactivity in an expansive manner, thus also combining a subversive critique of capitalist ideas of work and social conventions as well as the art world.”

A hallmark of Cosima von Bonin is her diversity of references. The artist also includes technicians, carpenters, and tailors in the process of creating her works. Her collaborators are also recurring figures, characters, and objects that often appear in her work in variations and series. Like a family, the artist brings them together in the exhibition space on pedestals, displays, and set designs and enables them to interact with each other.

A catalog COSIMA VON BONIN: FEELINGS, edited by Katharina Dohm, with contributions by Diedrich Diederichsen, Katharina Dohm, and Clara Drechsler, as well as a foreword by the director of the Schirn, Sebastian Baden, has been published in an German-English edition.

The exhibition Cosima von Bonin: feelings is supported by the Friends of the Schirn Kunsthalle e. V.

Director: Dr. Sebastian Baden
Curator: Katharina Dohm, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Press contact: Johanna Pulz (Head of Press/Public Relations): presse [​at​] schirn.de / T +49 (0) 69 29 98 82 148
Press material: schirn.de/en/newsroom