MOTHER MADONNA ME
Wiebke Bartsch, Marcela Boehm, Katharina Bosse, Judith Samen, Annie Wang
July 26 – August 23, 2025
Exhibition opening Friday, July 25, 2025, 7 p.m.
The exhibition Mother Madonna Me touches on a current socio-political topic in which the personal is simultaneously political: motherhood. In sculpture, painting, photography, and textile works, five artists explore the cultural influences of (historical) images of motherhood, question their own ideas of motherhood, and invent new images of motherhood. This ranges from the often glorified ideal of the Madonna, through the proverbial bad mothers, to images that focus on the physicality and the relationship between mother and child. Associations with the animalistic and grotesque appear in the works of art, for example when basic conditions of human existence, such as giving birth and feeding, are not taboo but are addressed. And the perspective on creativity and (artistic) creativity is also changing through female artists who bring their own motherhood and thus the co-productive nature of creative processes into the picture.
The exhibition is the result of a collaborative project between Galerie Obrist and two interdisciplinary project seminars at the University of Duisburg-Essen, from the Departments of Art History and German Literature. It is curated by students of the seminar “Images of Motherhood in Literature and Art” under the direction of Dr. Sabine Kampmann and Dr. Liane Schüller.