Gravidity. Maina-Miriam Munsky (1943-1999)
Painting and Drawing of the 1960s
4 June – 31 July 2021, in August by appointment

Fifty years after Maina-Miriam Munsky’s first solo exhibition in 1971, Galerie Poll is showing the artist’s early work from the 1960s for the first time in an exhibition titled “Gravidity”. In 1971, when Galerie Poll began to represent Munksy, her pictures and drawings of the female body had already begun to revolve around subjects such as fertility, pregnancy, and birth, though they still had a surreal cast. It was not until the 1970s that she found her hyperrealist style, schooled in New Objectivity, with which she has since become known.

Characteristic of her early paintings is the construction of a motif across two canvases separated from each other by horizontal or vertical white or black strips of wood in the thickness of a frame. The foetuses, mostly painted with pink resin, have the appearance of ornaments (“Tube”, “Two Boxes”, “Fertility”, “Gravidity”, “Embryos”, “Birth” II + IV, all 1967). The early pencil drawings (“Untitled”, all 1968) similarly show studies of foetuses in the womb and are composed of several pictorial frames.

“The bars marking the borders served as a shield from too much directness; the bodies, doughy and flowing and without firm contours, were reminiscent of plant-like, preexistential states. Seen in terms of Munsky’s overall development, this was itself an embryonic phase of her work,” Lucie Schauer writes in 1976 in the catalogue to the artist’s exhibition held at the Märkisches Museum in the city of Witten.

Munsky’s fascination with embryos in containers of preserving fluid, which she encountered during a 1967 visit to the natural science department of the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, provided the impetus for her artistic exploration of the theme of pregnancy: the glass vessels, depicted with perspectival lines, structure the paintings in an almost constructivist fashion, while the foetuses were realized in rather flowing, soft forms which form a motivic contrast to the containers.

From 1968/69, the artist turned directly to the process of birth. She depicts the moment of childbirth realistically, though still with the soft and diffusely flowing, painterly gesture of brushwork (“Child”, “Forceps” I + II, all 1968). From 1970 onwards, she produced her first paintings, modelled on photographs she took herself in a Berlin hospital. “Maina-Miriam Munsky donned a white coat and made her way into the delivery room with a camera, unobserved but herself observing with a precise eye. The photos are the realistic raw material for her oil paintings and etchings. Her visual productions, however, far exceed her photographic sources—not only because of her exaggeration of colours, but also because of the framing of the picture, its angle of vision,” Lucie Schauer notes in her 1971 exhibition review in the newspaper “Die Welt”. Pregnancy, birth, and clinical interventions in the human body remained central pictorial themes for Munsky until her death.

Maina-Miriam Munsky was born in Wolfenbüttel in 1943 and died in Berlin in 1999. She studied at the State University for Fine Arts in Braunschweig (Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste), the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence (Accademia di belle Arti), and the Berlin State School of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Bildende Künste), where she completed her studies in 1970 as a master’s student under Professors Alexander Camaro and Hermann Bachmann. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1968 at the artists’ gallery Großgörschen 35 in Berlin. Munsky is one of the founding members of the Gruppe Aspekt (1972–1978). From 1982 to 1984, she held a guest professorship as a painter at the HBK Braunschweig. In 1984 she received the Art Prize of the State of Lower Saxony. Her work is held by significant collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Berlinische Galerie – Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Berlin; the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; and the Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany. Munsky was married to the illustrator and graphic artist Peter Sorge (1937–2000). Their son Daniel was born in 1972.

Jan Schüler and Kunststiftung Poll, ed., “Maina-Miriam Munsky: Die Angst wegmalen”, inventory of paintings and drawings 1964–1998. With essays by Eva and Lothar C. Poll, Jan Schüler, Eckhart Gillen, Lucie Schauer, and Heinz Ohff. Bönen: Verlag Kettler, 2013. Price: 25 euros; special edition with a portrait photograph of the artist from 1977 by Erhard Wehrmann, edition of 15 + 5 a.p., price: 200 euros.

The exhibition is sponsored by: