With this exhibition, the Kunsthalle Mannheim is showing three artists who only achieved recognition in the art world late in life and are now among the most important representatives of their time. All three explored Surrealism early on and found their own individual visual language in different ways: the common thread is their preoccupation with light, space and the body as well as the existential question of self-perception and positioning in the world.
The American Nan Hoover (1931-2008) is one of the pioneers of international light, video and performance art. Her early painterly works, most of which have never been exhibited, revolve around the relationship between the sexes and sexuality and are close to Pop Art in terms of their colorfulness and formal language. Since the early 1970s, her performances, video works and light installations have approached a minimalist formal language based on reduction and reflection, in which time is interpreted and made conscious through the medium of extreme slowness and space through the medium of light.
Nan Hoover, Impressions, 1978, Video, Copyright Nan Hoover Foundation, Courtesy Sebastian Fath Contemporary
Anneliese Hager (1904-1997) made significant but hitherto under-recognized contributions to the medium of camera-less photography. She was also a talented surrealist poet and often combined her photograms, which she made with everyday household objects, with her own poetic texts. Hager was one of only three women and the only photographer to exhibit in the now legendary CoBrA exhibition in Amsterdam in 1949. Like the medium in which she worked, however, she was overshadowed by the rise of male painters on the international stage in the 1950s.
The Austrian painter Maria Lassnig (1919-2014) is today one of the most important artists of the 20th century, but only achieved her international breakthrough late, in the 1980s. After the Second World War, she explored Surrealism, tried out Art Informel, but soon found her way back to her original theme: the human body and the self-portrait. From the late 1940s onwards, she developed body awareness paintings - from the 1960s onwards, she spoke of body awareness paintings - analyses of bodily feelings, with which she became a forerunner of feminist body art.
The unjustly lacking recognition of the artists' work thus forms the core of the "Hoover Hager Lassnig" exhibition. The Kunsthalle focuses on three artists whose work is completely new or at least worth rediscovering.
November 10, 2023 to April 28, 2024
