The Mother Position - by Isabelle Graw (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The relationship between mother and child, or between caretaker and infant, has traditionally been represented as a symbiotic fusion within visual art; see the images of virgin and child by Raphael, for example. Inspired by the English psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, this exhibition takes a different view of those early childhood » object relations« that continue to shape how we relate to others throughout our lives. In addition to love and affection, Klein argues, the bond between the baby and its mother is also marked by aggressions, ambivalences, and strong anxious phantasies. » The Mother Position« brings together artworks that negotiate the complex nature of this paradigmatic object relation, whose long-term consequences resonate throughout. It is precisely because no artistic practice can do without an object relation that the equally libidinal and destructive object phantasies are worth examining. From this perspective, the fact that social interactions are currently often defined by negative feelings, splits, and one-sided repudiations is not only due to social media and the much-invoked » polarization« of contemporary society.

About the Author

Nicole Hackert (one of the founders of the gallery in 1992) with Bruno Brunnet are a permanent part of the international gallery world with CFA situated now at Grolmanstraß e in Berlin/Charlottenburg. Their work is inherent part with the beginning of artistic careers of Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Sarah Lucas, Jonathan Meese, Raymond Pettibon, TAL R, Daniel Richter, Dana Schutz, Norbert Schwontkowski, Katja Strunz, Juergen Teller, or Marianne Vitale, just to name a few. Bruno Brunnet (one of the founders of the gallery in 1992) with Nicole Hackert are a permanent part of the international gallery world with CFA situated now at Grolmanstraß e in Berlin/Charlottenburg. Their work is inherent part with the beginning of artistic careers of Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Sarah Lucas, Jonathan Meese, Raymond Pettibon, TAL R, Daniel Richter, Dana Schutz, Norbert Schwontkowski, Katja Strunz, Juergen Teller, or Marianne Vitale, just to name a few. Isabelle Graw (*1962, Hamburg) lives and works as an art critic in Berlin. She is Professor of Art History and Art Theory at the Stä delschule Frankfurt/Main and founded together with Daniel Birnbaum the Institute for Art Criticism in summer 2003, which focuses on the practice of criticism and its manifold relationships to other disciplines. Together with Stefan Germer, she founded quarterly magazine Texte zur Kunst in Cologne in 1990. Since 2018, she published several books on art and market, and celebrity culture, as well as readers with essays, reviews and interviews.