PRESENTATION: Lily van der Stokker & Maria VMier
On the occasion of “Various Others,” two site-specific projects open at Museum Brandhorst. The third “Flag Commission” are presented: a contribution by Lily van der Stokker, which can be seen in front of the museum, as well as Maria VMier’s intervention “no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin” on the upper level of the museum.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museum Brandhorst Archive
Since the late 1980s, Lily van der Stokker has been creating decorative wall paintings and installations composed of ornaments, furniture, bright colors, everyday objects and handwritten texts. “List of Rags” is a set of four flags designed by Lily van der Stokker are presented in front of the museum. The artist became known for her installations and murals, which are based on decorative imagery from everyday life and domestic spaces and which question these in terms of their gender and identity implications. Supposedly cute decorations are contrasted with subtle texts. For the flags Lily van der Stokker did not create an ornamental design with integrated text, but instead has literally places a list of German and English words relating to drugstore articles, items of clothing, household objects, physical ailments (and insults) in the public space. With “List of Rags”, she has created a site-specific work at the boundary between the Kunstareal and Maxvorstadt, between the museum district and the residential quarter. Terms such as “rag,” “belly cramps,” or “poopy diaper,” which we associate with the spheres of the private and intimate and with care work, now appear on the flagpoles of the museum. Lily van der Stokker’s ‘visual poetry’ thus creates a moment of disorientation for museum visitors and passers-by emblazoning terms from the private sphere in the outdoor space. Maria VMier’s practice encompasses context-specific and collaborative work, as well as sculpture, painting and printmaking. In her works, she deals with the body and desire and the associated post-feminist, social, and political implications. Recurring motifs are the conditions of artistic labor, hospitality, care work, and community. The central site of form-finding is her ongoing “Companion” series, in which she creates large-format paintings on paper from writing movements. “no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin” is a context-specific intervention Maria VMier and occupies the center of Cy Twombly’s Rose Room on the upper level of Museum Brandhorst. In the project, the artist, who alternates between New York and Munich, explores the possibilities of an erotic, community-building appropriation of the museum. Created over a period of more than four years (2020-2024) and in collaboration with a number of other artists, the project brings together research, texts, paintings, performances, gatherings, objects and a textile intervention. A woven work created in collaboration with textile artist Evelyn Sitter stretches out like a tent in the hall. Sitter’s hand-woven and dyed panels enter into a dialog with the painterly gesture in VMier’s floor drawing and Twombly’s roses, which he created especially for the museum. In this place characterized by desire and power relations, VMier, as an artist, asks for a protected space for interaction that is not provided for in the strictly regulated institutional structures. A feminist interpretation of the Platonic symposium serves as an image for the meeting. The title, “no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin,” is taken from a poem by Sappho, the most famous poet of antiquity, as translated by Anne Carson.
Photo: Maria VMier, no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin, 2024, With Evelyn Sitter (Fabric), @nnast_antn (Performance), The New York Board of Taste (Honorary membership) and many other Companions
Info: “List of Rags”: Curator: Arthur Fink, Museum Brandhorst, Theresienstraße 35a, Munich, Germany, Duration: 7/9/2024-25/3/2025, Days & Hours: Daily in front of the museum & “no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin”: Curator: Franziska Linhardt, Curatorial assistant: Zakirah Rabaney, Museum Brandhorst, Theresienstraße 35a, Munich, Germany, Duration: 3-15/9/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, www.museum-brandhorst.de/
