HEART FACTS mothers in art

– English Text  –

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"Sex, death, politics: art can show anything today. But children? They are not a subject." wrote Elke Buhr in her cover article "The Last Taboo" of the February 2019 issue of monopol magazine. One's own children as subject matter for one’s art works? Better not - especially if the artist is their mother (and not their father).

 

The artists Alke Brinkmann and Ines Doleschal touch the taboo three times in their exhibition HEART FACTS: they are confessing mothers. They artistically thematize their children. The fact that the children are also allowed to actively participate in the artistic process is an experiment - but why not? 

 

Brinkmann has always painted her children. Huge and powerful, images of intense colors. But she has rarely shown them. Brinkmann knows the problem of invisibility, which grows proportionally with each additional child. Gallerists saw the growing number of children as obstacles and mistakes in her career planning. Indeed the careers of female artists are different from those of their male colleagues because female artists cannot delegate pregnancy and breastfeeding. On the art market, they are always measured by the performance of men and are sometimes sorted out during the phase of starting a family. Some are able to make a late leap back into the market. In HEART FACTS, Brinkmann demonstrates that she has continued to work despite the many obstacles. Her oeuvre is large.

 

The prejudice that care work and creative work are not compatible is as virulent today as it was then. Doleschal's "Posters for Parity," which she has already begun in 2019 for her exhibition concept KLASSE DAMEN! at Schloss Biesdorf, states this. Here, the range of asymmetry between fatherhood and motherhood in the art world, between acceptance and taboo, is imaginatively explored. The posters manifest the personal handling of the daily challenge between children, bread job and profession. While the series Väter&Mütter (Fathers&Mothers) addresses her own origins in a very intimate way using original photographs from the 1920s onwards, in "Corona Cycle" she works with her children and they with mother's art. In the process, collages by and with Leo, Ada and Fridolin were created during the initial Corona lockdown 2020 – with a bilaterally fertilizing artistic effect.

 

The exhibition may be an affront to the conventions of the Western art establishment. If so - the artists intend nothing else! With HEART FACTS they proclaim the(ir) motto of the new decade: art AND child(ren)! 

 

Catalogue presentation and panel discussion on September 11, 2021, at 5:30 p.m. at the Inselgalerie, Petersburger Str. 76 A, 10249 Berlin.

The catalogue is published by KRAUTin-Verlag with texts by Helen Adkins and Ines Doleschal.

 

The exhibition is sponsored by

Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien

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