Just Love at ZAK Center for Contemporary Art in Berlin
Belinda X-Press. Courtesy of Martina Minette Dreier.
Just Love
September 14 – December 15, 2019
ZAK Center for Contemporary Art – Galerie ground floor
Zitadelle Spandau, 13599 Berlin
ZAK Center for Contemporary Art: Queer self-image and the reality of life in urban communities are the focus of the exhibition “Just Love” with six artists working predominantly in painting. They combine their view of their own subjective life’s with fundamental questions about the social acceptance and visibility of queers in the present day. The focus is on topics such as self-assurance, personal life situations and social environment, which are often reflected in the productive appropriation of classical subjects of fine art. Both in correspondence with and in contrast to a predominantly heteronormative art history, the six painters develop their own pictorial worlds, whose motifs stem from a reality of life in which love, sexuality, political action and their visualization play just as central a role as social normality and daily self-understanding. The sources of many works can be found both in the personal sphere of life and in the media pictorial world of the present. Self-confidently and sometimes provocatively staged, the genres provide the occasion for differentiated and contemporary painting between the poles of realism, abstraction, pop and concept.
With: Max Diel, Kerstin Drechsel, Martina Minette Dreier, Christian Perdix, Dietrich Walther and Georg Weise.
Exhibition view from Just Love with paintings by Martina Minette Dreier.
About Martina Minette Dreier
Berlin-based artist Martina Minette Dreier is working with questions of identity and Sehnsucht (longing). Best known for her delicate portraits of gender variant persons, she has by now created around 80 life-sized paintings in oil on canvas, a technique formerly reserved solely for the royalty, the popes, and the gentry. Painted from life model, these paintings are generating a representative force, talking about reputation, mightiness, importance, and dignity, and are thus claiming a social position gender outlaws can’t often take for granted. In the exhibition Just Love she is showing a selection of her portraits painted by life model, some aquarelles, and three sculptural objects.
Fine-armed Daughter of Night (featuring Fixie Fate). Courtesy of Martina Minette Dreier.
Preach! (featuring Stephanie Kuhnen). Courtesy of Martina Minette Dreier.