Mark Müller

Monika Brandmeier

08 Mar - 19 Apr 2014

Exhibition view • Monika Brandmeier «Reflexbox», 2014
MONIKA BRANDMEIER
Reflexbox
8 March – 19 April 2014

In her sixth solo show at Mark Müller, Monika Brandmeier shows works from the last four years in a dense installation, revealing points of correspondence among them.

In various media, simple geometric and architectural subjects are transformed symbolically, taking on geometric or strangely unfamiliar preliminary forms of the figurative.

The work deals with gaps and seams, bridges and lines. But above all, the work explores the two motifs of depth and barriers, perspectives and crossings, that spring from one work to another, changing to a different medium, sometimes hidden in the motif, and show themselves foregrounded in another work.

The illusion of depth, the surface crosses, boxes and barriers stand in an indissoluble contradiction. And it is precisely this contradiction that dynamizes the works and keeps the exhibition in movement in terms of its references.

The photograph “Tür und Besen“ (Door and Broom) here provides the same thing as an abstract panel, reinforced with a cross, that evokes the association of a door in space (“Grünes X” [Green X]). An “apron” of plywood overcomes an interrupted line and a leveled structure of lines that appears to have been repaired, “Vier Stumpfe Winkel” (Four Simple Angles) on the large wall, leads her motif several millimeters out of the exhibition space.

A universe of materials, things, and signs emerges that the visitor can explore in the correspondences among the works. The links to the everyday world, sometimes vague and then once again clear, despite all the strangeness of the forms, creates a familiarity about which Tan Lin says that we need it “to fasten and connect the physical world together into a place we know.” 1

Monika Brandmeier studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Erich Reusch, lives in Berlin and Dresden, and teaches sculpture at Dresden’s Hochschule für Bildende Künste. Her work is also currently on view at the exhibition “Lens-based Sculpture:
Die Veränderung der Skulptur durch die Fotografie” at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste.

1 Tan Lin, “Reading In On and In Between the Work of MB,” Monika Brandmeier: Sachverhalt,
Nuremberg 2009
 

Tags: Monika Brandmeier, Erich Reusch