HUMLEBÆK.- The big exhibition of the summer at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is a comprehensive presentation of the German artist Gabriele Münter’s works with around 140 items, several of them shown for the first time.

The German painter Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), one of the most important representatives of German Expressionism and a member of the artists’ group ‘Der Blaue Reiter’, participated actively in the breakthrough of modern painting in Munich around 1910. Münter’s work as a whole has hitherto not been granted much space in the history of art. Usually she has been exhibited and interpreted in the context of her relationship and collaboration with the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) in the years around the formation of the artists’ group ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ (1911-1914). For the first time since 1992 Louisiana’s exhibition unfolds all of Münter’s life’s work and presents the artist in her own right.

The focus of the exhibition is on her artistic process and her confrontations with artistic and thematic issues.

It is the aim of the exhibition to help to expand a hitherto narrow view of Münter’s oeuvre by opening up new facets of her work and thus emphasizing its stylistic diversity and artistic independence. Her painting is characterized by direct registration of the seen, brightness and intensity of colour and a simplified formal idiom.

The exhibition
In thematic samples which clarify both artistic departures and recurrent features, the exhibition applies a present-day gaze to the artist’s overall oeuvre. The themes range from classic genres such as landscapes, portraits and interiors to chapters that go into more depth about Münter’s engagement with the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ (New Objectivity) and abstraction to her interest in foreign cultures, folk art and children’s drawings. For the first time the museum is also showing a large group of Münter’s early photographs, which she took on a journey across the USA at the age of 21, along with her paintings.

The exhibition presents around 140 works from six decades, which show how Münter constantly seeks out new expressive possibilities and painterly solutions. Many of the exhibited paintings have not ben shown before, and the exhibition thus offers a nuanced overview of her impactful and stylistically complex painterly production with opportunities to delve deeper into special aspects of Münter’s activities.

The bulk of the exhibited works come from the Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung in Munich, supplemented by rare loans from private collections and museums in Europe and the USA.

The exhibition is shown in the museum’s South Wing, and is designed by the exhibition architect Maya Lahmy.

Gabriele Münter lived from 1877 until 1962 in USA, Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark. Around 1900, before the artist began to paint, she had begun to take photographs – the first time on a trip to the USA. Camera in hand, she captured and fixed ‘the world’, and one can see that Münter’s artistic development had already begun with these photographs. Soon she also started to paint almost daily, and continued along this track throughout her life.

Gabriele Münter was an open-minded, experimental artist with a huge international network and growing, comprehensive exhibition activities. During World War I she lived in Stockholm and Copenhagen, where she had her hitherto largest solo exhibition in 1918 at Den Frie, Copenhagen with 100 paintings, 20 stained glass works, etchings and wall paintings. Her complete oeuvre, created over a period of 60 years, comprises around 1200 photographs, over 2200 paintings, thousands of drawings, water-colours, stained glass works, prints and embroideries.

Film in the exhibition
The film Gabriele Münter – Malen ohne Umschweife (Painting to the Point) (2017) by Marieke Schroeder, produced by Thali Media in collaboration with Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München and the Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung, Munich, is being shown in the exhibition.

Catalogue
For the exhibition a special catalogue has been published by Prestel in Munich in German and English, edited by Isabelle Jansen (Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung, Munich) and Matthias Mühling (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München). The catalogue includes a foreword, an introduction to the exhibition and introductory articles to the exhibition’s chapters by Isabelle Jansen with reproductions of the works in the exhibition. The catalogue also has an extensive documentation section, which among other features a biography and bibliography