Brandhorst Flag Commission: Lily van der Stokker
until
This year's “Brandhorst Flag Commission” was designed by Lily van der Stokker. 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 intriguing texts.
Exhibition info
until
Outdoor space
Arthur Fink
List of Rags
For the flags for Museum Brandhorst, Lily van der Stokker did not – as one might expect – create an ornamental design with integrated text, but instead 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 neighborhood. 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 perplexity for museum visitors and passers-by emblazoning terms from the private sphere in the outdoor space.
Art in public space
With “Flag Commission,” Museum Brandhorst goes beyond the boundaries of the exhibition space and presents specially commissioned works of art in the neighborhood of the Maxvorstadt district. Normally, the flags on the corner of Türkenstrasse and Theresienstrasse advertise the museum’s current exhibitions. But for the “Flag Commission”, artists use them as outdoor spaces to create interventions in public space.
