BEATE WASSERMANN - Balancing Acts

venue: Turbine Hall

BEATE WASSERMANN Balancing Acts September 25, 2021 – February 20, 2022

Balancing Acts, opening on September 25, is the first exhibition in Scandinavia of Beate Wassermann (1947 – 2018). With works spanning five decades, the exhibition explores the many facets of Wassermann’s unique painting.

Beate Wassermann grew up in post-war Germany which had a strong impact on her. Her powerful, mainly abstract paintings were inspired by everyday life and the profane as well as the sacred – two spheres that she never considered contradictory. Wassermann developed a profoundly singular style of painting. In her works, often in large formats, she condensed what she saw around her into signs or symbol-like shapes.

- Beate Wassermann perceived colours and shapes as animated energies, says curator of the exhibition, Museum Director Iris Müller-Westermann. The image was her mental and directly physical field of dialogue. Her painterly practice explores the role of artist, human being, woman and mother – as in the early self-portrait “Madonna von Altona” from 1979, where the highly pregnant artist is standing in a beam of light, with paint brushes in her hair like a crown of thorns, wearing pointed, elegant shoes. Her paintings are highly physical, always with proportions that relate to her own body. Balancing different aspects of life, shapes and colours, light and darkness, the near and the distant, is central to Wassermann’s oeuvre.

Beate Wassermann saw herself as a collector, finding forms and structures in everyday life that felt familiar on a deeper level. Painting was an ongoing contemplation to her. She perceived her images as likenesses of experiences and the paintings became answers to her own questions. From the mid-1990s, when she began creating glass windows for churches and other public, monumental buildings, her paintings reached new levels of freedom and gradually lightened from within.

Beate Wassermann studied at the Art Academy, first in Berlin, then in Hamburg. She lived and worked in Hamburg-Altona and periodically in Italy. Wassermann’s work has been shown in Germany and other countries in Europe. Balancing Acts is the artist’s first retrospective exhibition, offering an insight into how her images sprang from earlier pictures, and how themes were modified and resumed throughout her career.

With this exhibition Moderna Museet Malmö contributes yet again to highlighting exciting and important women artists who have been overlooked in a male-dominated art world. In connection with the exhibition, Moderna Museet will publish a catalogue presenting Beate Wassermann's oevre.