MUNICH.- On the occasion of “Various Others,” two site-specific projects opened at Museum Brandhorst. The third “Flag Commission” is being presented: a contribution by Lily van der Stokker, which can be seen in front of the museum, as well as Maria VMier’s intervention “no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin” on the upper level of the museum.

Lily van der Stokker: List of Rags
September 7, 2024 – March 15, 2025, in front of the museum

As part of the “Brandhorst Flag Commission,” four flags designed by Lily van der Stokker are presented in front of the museum. The artist became known for her installations and murals, which are based on decorative imagery from everyday life and domestic spaces and which question these in terms of their gender and identity implications. Supposedly cute decorations are contrasted with subtle texts.

For the flags for Museum Brandhorst, Lily van der Stokker did not – as one might expect – create an ornamental design with integrated text, but instead has literally places a list of German and English words relating to drugstore articles, items of clothing, household objects, physical ailments (and insults) in the public space. With “List of Rags”, she has created a site-specific work at the boundary between the Kunstareal and Maxvorstadt, between the museum district and the residential quarter. Terms such as “rag,” “belly cramps,” or “poopy diaper,” which we associate with the spheres of the private and intimate and with care work, now appear on the flagpoles of the museum. Lily van der Stokker’s ‘visual poetry’ thus creates a moment of disorientation for museum visitors and passers-by emblazoning terms from the private sphere in the outdoor space.

Art in public space

With “Flag Commission,” Museum Brandhorst goes beyond the boundaries of the exhibition space and presents specially commissioned works of art in the neighborhood of the Maxvorstadt district. Normally, the flags on the corner of Türkenstrasse and Theresienstrasse advertise the museum's current exhibitions. But for the "Flag Commission", artists use them as outdoor spaces to create interventions in public space.

Curated by: Arthur Fink

Lily van der Stokker

Lily van der Stokker (*1954) lives and works in Amsterdam and New York. Since the late 1980s, she has been creating decorative wall paintings and installations composed of ornaments, furniture, bright colors, everyday objects and handwritten texts. Most recently, she has had major institutional solo exhibitions at the Camden Art Centre, London (2022), the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2019), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2018), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015), the New Museum, New York (2013), and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2010). Her exhibition “I am here” can still be seen at the Frac Normandie in Caen until December 22, 2024.

Maria VMier: “no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin”
September 3–15, 2024, on the upper level of the museum

A context-specific intervention by artist Maria VMier occupies the center of Cy Twombly’s Rose Room on the upper level of Museum Brandhorst. In the project, the artist, who alternates between New York and Munich, explores the possibilities of an erotic, community-building appropriation of the museum.

Created over a period of more than four years (2020-2024) and in collaboration with a number of other artists, the project brings together research, texts, paintings, performances, gatherings, objects and a textile intervention. A woven work created in collaboration with textile artist Evelyn Sitter stretches out like a tent in the hall. Sitter’s hand-woven and dyed panels enter into a dialog with the painterly gesture in VMier’s floor drawing and Twombly’s roses, which he created especially for the museum. In this place characterized by desire and power relations, VMier, as an artist, asks for a protected space for interaction that is not provided for in the strictly regulated institutional structures. A feminist interpretation of the Platonic symposium serves as an image for the meeting.

The title, “no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin,” is taken from a poem by Sappho, the most famous poet of antiquity, as translated by Anne Carson. Various performative readings by museum staff will take place during the exhibition. In a final unveiling ceremony by the performer @nnast_antn, Sappho becomes the host. Playing with the symbolic charge and traditional codes of the museum, she traverses the heteropatriarchal relationship between gaze, body, power and desire.

Curated by: Franziska Linhardt

Curatorial assistant: Zakirah Rabaney

Maria VMier

Maria VMier is an artist who lives and works in Munich and New York. Her multidisciplinary practice includes context-specific and collaborative work as well as sculpture, painting and graphics. Her work deals with the body and desire and the associated post-feminist, social and political implications. Recurring motifs are the conditions of artistic work, hosting, care work and community. Her ongoing “Companion” series, in which large-format paintings on paper are created from writing motions, is the key piece in shaping her creative work.

Since 2013, VMier has run the publishing outfit Hammann von Mier Verlag für Künstler:innenbücher with Stefanie Hammann, and since 2017 she has been working with Leo Heinik and Jan Erbelding in the Ruine München collective. VMier was on the committee of the municipal art space FLORIDA Lothringer 13 from 2019 to 2022 and was part of the exhibition jury of the BBK Munich and Upper Bavaria between 2017 and 2020. Her works have been shown at MoMA PS1, New York (2024), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2024), Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2024, 2022), Artspace Boan 1942, Seoul (2020), Lenbachhaus, Munich (2020), and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2013), among others. Her work, whether solo or in collaboration, has received numerous awards, including the Bavarian Art Promotion Prize for Fine Arts and the FLAT Prize of the CRT Art Foundation in Turin.