Various Others: Lily van der Stokker | Maria VMier

Lily van der Stokker | Maria VMier

Lily van der Stokker: List of Rags

September 7, 2024 – March 15, 2025, „Brandhorst Flag Commission“, in front of the museum

Maria VMier: „no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin“

3–15 September 2024, on the upper level of the museum

Project presentation and breakfast vernissage
Saturday, September 7, 2024, 11 a.m.
Coffee and snacks will be served.

On the occasion of “Various Others,” two site-specific projects will open at Museum Brandhorst. The third “Flag Commission” will be 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.

Lily van der Stokker: List of Rags

September 7, 2024 – March 15, 2025, in front of the museum

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.

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.

Curated by: Arthur Fink

About Lily van der Stokker
Lily van der Stokker (*1954) lives and works in Amsterdam and New York. Since the late 1980s, she has been creating decorative wall paintings and installations composed of ornaments, furniture, bright colors, everyday objects and handwritten texts. Most recently, she has had major institutional solo exhibitions at the Camden Art Centre, London (2022), the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2019), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2018), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015), the New Museum, New York (2013), and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2010). Her exhibition “I am here” can still be seen at the Frac Normandie in Caen until December 22, 2024.

Maria VMier: “no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin”

September 3–15, 2024, on the upper level of the museum

A context-specific intervention by the artist Maria VMier occupies the center of Cy Twombly’s Roses Gallery on the upper floor of Museum Brandhorst. In this project, the artist, who lives between New York and Munich, questions 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 many Companions, the project manifests itself in research, texts, paintings, performances, gatherings, objects, and a textile intervention. A woven work, created in collaboration with textile artist Evelyn Sitter, stretches across the room like a tent. Sitter’s hand-woven and hand-dyed strips engage in a dialogue with the painterly gesture in VMier’s floor drawing and Twombly’s roses, which he created especially for the museum. In this location characterized by relationships of desire and power, VMier, as an artist, requests a protected space for exchange. However, such a forum is not typically provided within the museum’s strictly regulated institutional structures. This gathering is thus symbolically represented through a feminist interpretation of Plato’s Symposium.

The title, “no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin,” comes from a poem by Sappho, the most famous poet of ancient Greece, translated by Anne Carson. Various performative readings by museum staff will take place during the exhibition. In a final unveiling ceremony by the performer @nnast_antn, Sappho becomes the host. In a playful and sensual encounter with the symbolic charge and traditional codes of the museum, she traverses the heteropatriarchal relationship between gaze, body, power, and desire.

Curated by: Franziska Linhardt
Curatorial assistant: Zakirah Rabaney

Saturday, September 7, 2024, 12 noon
Curator tour: Dialog on Maria VMier – Museum Brandhorst x Pinakothek der Moderne
Cross-venue guided tour with curators Franziska Linhardt and Judith Csiki through “no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin” at Museum Brandhorst and “UNRUHE. Hans Hartung und Maria VMier” at the Pinakothek der Moderne. The tour starts in the foyer of Museum Brandhorst.

Sunday, September 15, 2024, 5 p.m.
Performance: “desire moves. eros is a verb. a ceremony of dismantling” by @nnast_antn
The performance by artist @nnast_antn starts in Cy Twombly’s Roses Gallery on the upper level of the museum, proceeds through the institution and out onto the street.

Curated by: Franziska Linhardt

Curatorial assistant: Zakirah Rabaney

About Maria VMier
Maria VMier is an artist who lives and works in Munich and New York. Their multidisciplinary practice encompasses context-specific and collaborative work as well as sculpture, painting and printmaking. In their works, they deal 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 their ongoing “Companion” series, in which they create large-format paintings on paper.

Since 2013, VMier co-runs the publishing house for artists’ books Hammann von Mier-Verlag together with Stefanie Hammann, and since 2017 they have been collaborating with Leo Heinik and Jan Erbelding in the collective Ruine München. VMier was on the committee of the municipal art space FLORIDA Lothringer 13 from 2019 until 2022 and was also part of the exhibition jury of the BBK Munich and Upper Bavaria between 2017 and 2020. Their work has been shown at MoMA PS1, New York (2024), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2024), Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2024, 2022), BOAN Artspace, Seoul (2020), Lenbachhaus, Munich (2020), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2013), among others. Their work, whether solo or in collaboration, has been honored with numerous awards, including the Bavarian Art Promotion Prize for Fine Arts and the FLAT Prize of the CRT Art Foundation in Turin.