MOTHER MADONNA ME

In the organizer's words:

The exhibition touches on a current socio-political topic in which the personal is also political: motherhood. In sculpture, painting, photography and textile works, five artists explore cultural imprints through (historical) images of mothers, question their own ideas of motherhood and invent new images of motherhood. The works range from the often glorified maternal ideal of the Madonna, to the proverbial raven mothers, to images that focus on the physicality and togetherness of mother and child. Associations with the animalistic and the grotesque appear in the works of art, for example when the basic conditions of being human, giving birth and feeding, are not tabooed, but are thematized. But the perspective on creativity and (artistic) creative power is also changed by female artists who bring their own motherhood and thus also the co-productive character of creative processes into the picture.
The exhibition is the result of a cooperation project between Galerie Obrist and two interdisciplinary project seminars at the University of Duisburg-Essen from the departments of Art Studies and German Literature. It is curated by students of the seminars "Mother Images in Literature and Art" under the direction of Dr. Sabine Kampmann and Dr. Liane Schüller.