Monica Majoli Retrospective

With a large retrospective on the queer-lesbian, Italian American artist Monica Majoli, the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf will introduce German and European audiences to her radical and extraordinary work. Majoli’s art focuses on human intimacy and desire, and how sexuality is connected to awareness and memory. During the AIDS crisis, she explored the lethality of HIV from a seldom-told, queer-lesbian feminist perspective. One of the ways she expresses the transience and ephemerality of physicality, sexuality and intimacy is through the conceptual use of aquarelle and gouache painting. Documentary photos from gay magazines of the 1970s often serve as her source material.

The solo exhibition at the Kunstverein brings together a number of Majoli’s work series, including a new cycle of large-format woodcuts which she created especially for the exhibition and for which she applied a new and artistically sophisticated analogue pictorial technique. In these series, she highlights the resurgence of idealised, homoerotic body concepts of Greek antiquity in German Classicism and draws a line to the pioneering queer magazines of the 1970s. The thorny issues of social inclusion/exclusion, marginalisation and stigmatisation are also clearly visible in her work. The exhibition will be supplemented by an extensive accompanying programme.

Artistic director: Kathrin Bentele
Artist: Monica Majoli