Neue Sachlichkeit: Cat. Cfa Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin

I must paint you! I simply must! - this said Otto Dix to Sylvia von Harden when he ran into her on the street. You are representative of an entire epoch! Clearing out her closet of the heavy dresses that burdened her mother’s generation and replacing them with a cigarette and a perky bob, the New Woman of the 1920s had become a myth of its own. The frozen iconography of that time, largely created by the media, was being challenged and explored in her many facets by the female artists and writers of the time. Until recently, many of them have been half-forgotten. Without question, the New Woman of the Weimar Republic didn’t exist, but there were plenty of new women. Fast forward a hundred years and a lot has changed, but a lot hasn’t. Amidst the all-pervasiveness of digital image phenomena, contemporary artists gathered in this brochure revisit the notions of objectivity and facticity through their distinct takes on figuration and representation. Indeed, in a time when the flaneuse is no more and the scrolleuse takes her place, as the world unfolds at our fingertips, the real and the surreal are bound to get mixed up. Artists: Jagoda Bednarski, Genesis Belanger, Ellen Berken