Berlin Art Week – neither fat nor felt

Who still remembers the second women’s movement? Of those who are feminist nowadays, probably not many. Most were not old enough in the 1970s to actively perceive the movement, or have not yet been born. You can’t blame them. The feminist discourse has also changed, which is why a connection to the protagonists of the sexual revolution from the FRG and GDR may seem difficult these days. At that time, for example, the concept of transformation was only played a subordinate role and was critically viewed or even rejected by many feminist currents. Nevertheless, a lot has already been argued in a similar way – for example, how much woman was allowed to correspond to the “male look” how much staged female beauty and sexuality were wearable or treacherous.

Two FRG feminists of the second wave, who never sworn in beauty and elegance-or what they found as beautiful and elegant-were the artist Sarah Schumann (1933–2019) and her friend and life partner, the writer Silvia Bovenschen (1946–2017). In her book “Sarah’s law” (2015), which she wrote about Schumann, Bovenschen describes her first encounter with a girlfriend’s picture, a collage. On top of that, a sitting beautiful woman, “almost life -sized”, in front of a landscape with rocks, trees and animals that “reduced in perspective, have moved into a miraculous distance”.

Bovenschen, who hardly knows Schumann at that time, wonders when looking at the opulent, colored collage for a brief moment asks whether she can “find the good”. Finally, she also internalized the “unspoken art-theoretical avant-garde dogma of that time”-she talks about the FRG of the 1970s. Shortly afterwards she rejects the thought that she can’t help it, “the image power expires”. In the course of the following years – about 40 – she not only writes numerous essays about the collages and paintings of her friend, but also becomes the artistic subject of Schumann again and again.

“… and never uses wrapping paper!”

–

Some of these Bovenschen portraits-in addition to numerous other works by Schumann from 1954 to 1982-are currently exhibited in the Berlin Galerie Meyer Riegger. As part of the Berlin Art Week, with which over 100 museums, project rooms and galleries in the capital also heralded the art of autumn this weekend, the “Quasi-Museal” showed according to the press text “Last Thursday.

The actually very extensive exhibition material is spread over two floors. You can see over 60 of the “shock collages” (1957–1964) Schumann’s-small-format, black and white and sepia tones kept paper collages or photographs of the same that belong to their early work. In addition, there are Informel paintings that Schumann, at that time still hot, brought in the first artistic success in the late 1950s, as well as other collages, small and colorful. In addition, cover designs and other illustrations for feminist publications as well as large-format linen and wooden walls, on which, also in collabeaned form, color photographs of people on oil paint, plaster, coal, gold and silver bronze, pencil and other materials meet. Sarah Schumann was not a minimalist.

At the center of this exhibition is the artist’s discussion with female sub- and objectivity. In her “shock collages” Sarah Schumann moves out of photographs, among other things, the women’s body and heads separated from photographs -sometimes it is also those of children, but only rarely the image of a man finds his way to work -oversized in landscapes that are not necessarily inviting, but are drawn by natural disasters or human destruction.

These pictures play with far past representation traditions, such as Renaissance painting or the ancient sculpture. They are surreal, and but not the social reality of the second half of the past century, in which they were created. For example, if a female figure in hand is hanging around on the Hungarian border under barbed wire or a crying barefoot girl – presumably a photography that was taken in Vietnam during the war – lies as a huge or in a channel between forests, then political covers can be made without difficulty.

Later Collages Schumanns emerged from work with an expanded spectrum of materials. The artist no longer only uses excerpts from paper photographs, but also from illustrations of human anatomy, as well as human hair, peacock feathers, dried flowers and leaves. They are small, filigree compositions that artfully intertwined, playful and almost neatly intertwined.

In »Sarah’s law« Bovenschen remembers how a journalist wrote out when you see a collage of her friend: »… and she never uses wrapping paper!« Bovenschen adds: »He could also have said fat or felt.« No, with Joseph Beuys’ fat and felt works of art, which in the 1970s met the zeitgeist in the FRG (and also elsewhere), has the aesthetic cosmos Sarah Schumann’s nothing in common.

This can also be interpreted politically: Schumann’s work does not push back to an imaginated originality and naturalness, but stages people and, above all, women as a social being. Only in the further development of civilization can the liberation of social grievances be found. And unlike some differential feminists claim in the 1970s, there is nothing genuinely female outside of the classified body and its functions. The woman was “not born as a woman, but is made to her” (Simone de Beauvoir).

Sarah Schumann’s work is supplemented in the Meyer Riegger gallery by Harun Farocki’s film “A picture by Sarah Schumann” (1976/78), who documents the creation of a plant of the artist, and a revision of Michaela Mélian’s video installation (2012) on the exhibition “International International 1877–1977”. An integral part of the installation is a video in which Schumann and Bovenschen remember the exhibition organized by them and some fellow campaigners in 1977 in the Berlin Castle Charlottenburg. At the time, they managed to win museums from all over the world for their project, which was to make female artists more validity. The exhibition showed works by Georgia O’Keffe, Diane Arbus, Sonia Delaunay, Frida Kahlo, Maria Lassnig, Louise Bourgeois and others – many of these work, writes Bovenschen in »Sarah’s law«, and was the first to see her in the original for the first time.

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Nowadays it is hard to imagine how much resistance the exhibition makers felt. In her book, Bovenschen remembers “foaming protests” and “Misogyne’s abrasion shout”, but also of “shrill fundamental feminists”. “Some of them announced that women are neither enabled nor justified in accordance with their natural equipment and social determination to art, the others that all women are artists without exception and that therefore a misisting cheek can be seen in any selection process.”

Bovenschen, Schumann and her friends were not impressed by all of this and pulled their thing through. This is not only worth the memory, but can also be inspiration for contemporary feminist movements that do not want to humid.

“Sarah Schumann: paintings and collages from 1954 to 1982”, until November 1, 2025, Meyer Riegger Gallery.
The entire program of Berlin Art Week (September 10th to 14th) can be found at: www.berlinartweek.de