FRANKFURT.- The first exhibition at the MMK 2 – “Boom She Boom: Works from the MMK Collection (19 October 2014 – 14 June 2015) is devoted to women artists in the MMK collection. Among Germany’s contemporary art museums, the MMK is unique in that, from its founding in 1991 to the present, it has directed special attention to the strong contributions of women artists of the past decades. Since the early 1990s, works by the major German women sculptors and concept artists of the present, for example Katharina Fritsch, Isa Genzken and Rosemarie Trockel, have been acquired for the collection, along with those of their colleagues abroad, including Vija Celmins, Marlene Dumas, Cady Noland, Pipilotti Rist and Sturtevant. The influence of these women artists on the development of the visual arts has been and is fundamental. With their radical and uncompromising approaches, they have shaped styles and, to this day, served the following generations as important examples. With such distinctive artistic positions as those of Charlotte Posenenske, Louise Lawler, Lee Lozano and Joe Baer, the MMK collection retraces the history of contemporary art back to the early 1960s. In the area of photography as well, one of the focusses of the museum’s collection, such prominent female protagonists as Hilla Becher, Anna Blume and Candida Höfer, as well as the documentarists Barbara Klemm, Anja Niedringhaus and Abisag Tüllmann are all represented.

A survey of the purchases made over the past years strikingly mirrors the fact that women artists account for a very large number of the MMK collection’s recent acquisitions. Major works by Vanessa Beecroft, Rineke Dijkstra, Teresa Margolles, Sarah Morris, Taryn Simon and others mark significant expansions of the collection, which more recently has been enhanced with workgroups by women presently in the limelight of the international art world, for example Andrea Büttner, Jewyo Rhij, Dayanita Singh and Dolores Zinny. From the beginning, the MMK has also devoted itself to the Frankfurt art scene, and here as well the museum’s holdings are enriched by such individualist and radical perspectives as that of Anne Imhof, Franziska Kneidl and Adrian Williams.

It is with the diversity and strength radiated by the works of these women artists that the MMK would like to celebrate its new presence in the centre of Frankfurt. The selection encompasses various artistic techniques and conceptual approaches and presents a wide range of issues and perspectives. In sculptures and installations, paintings and drawings, films and performances, the featured artists question the representation and societal connotation of the female body, concern themselves with social and global matters, investigate forms of narration and abstraction, and analyze strategies for the appropriation of space. Their works are distinguished by individual perceptions and personal experiences; they demonstrate subversiveness and the courage to be open. Two new productions by Tamara Grcic and Eva Koťátková were carried out especially for the MMK 2’s inaugural show and will be on view here for the first time.

The exhibition title “Boom She Boom” quotes the sensationally successful doo-wop song of 1954 by the Chords, which has undergone many reinterpretations since that time. Intended more than anything a declaration of love to a woman, “sh-boom” makes onomatopoetic reference to the dropping of a bomb and thus to the climax reached by the Cold War in the year the song was first produced. In the context of the exhibition concept, a further level of meaning is added to the hedonist and fatalist connotations of the title, a level on which the demands and realities of the presence of women artists in the museum world is made emphatically manifest.