Flowers? Cake? An entire exhibition on Mother’s Day! – Diepresse.com

If a museum entitled « Mama. From Maria to Merkel » would like to blow the media attention – with pink as a subtle leading color – then it is not surprising that you are welcomed in the Düsseldorf art palace with the bell brightness, some of my shrill voice of twelve -year -old Heintje. With the Megahit « Mama » he became a model boy of the nation in 1967.

But the scraps of the sluts are exploited here. You just have to put on the headphones, then the Italian primary version of 1938, written for Beniamino Gigli, and their ideologized formalization from 1941. What with the lines « Mama, you should not cry for your boy/Fate will unite us again » today sounds like a harmless farewell song, mothers take the fear that their sons could no longer come from the war service. So a hortle song.

Chancellor Angela Merkel in the habit of the religious woman

In a showcase then a « Spiegel » cover from 2015 titled « Mother Teresa », which Chancellor Merkel shows in the habit of the religious. It is flanked by a headline in the « Sunday Times Magazine » from 2021: « Goodbye, mom ». On the wall, a royal family picture from 1952 around the freshly crowned Queen Elizabeth, who bravely smiles away at her double bonds as a good family and state mother. Mutti in civil service.

Even before works of art come into view, there are so plenty of association opportunities in order to deal with « the diverse views of what it means to be a mother ». The elegant backpack begins to fill in the anteroom with five MIT Tenk questions. « Who will take care of you? » Is one. « Do you have mother’s feelings? », Another. A brisk time sheet spans more than 500 years to get to the bottom of the discrepancy between idealization and reality.

With Heintje in your ear you stand in front of 15 carved girls with a child from the late Middle Ages. In the text there is the request to pay attention to differences in the facial expression. Sometimes Maria look « stately » on Baby Jesus, sometimes « obvious and loving ». But her head is small, and the specimens in the top row, including a gold -plated Madonna von Veit, is difficult to understand this.

An iconographic panorama

Strictly speaking, it is not an art exhibition, but an iconographic panorama in which everyday objects and popular cultural culture as cipher for myths, time fashions and stereotypes play in an equal footing. The price for this is close neighborhoods and a tendency towards leveling. The paintings and sculptures that are trapped in this way, including well -known works by Hannah Höch or Egon Schiele, are sometimes missing. You are tempted to check them off only in terms of content and as time documents. An impressive ensemble of small-format pale-colored paintings by Paula Modersohn-Becker with children’s views and a portrait of a mother of a worrying mother, which was created in 1902, shares a wall with baby bottles from three centuries.

A central theme strand applies to the overlay and competition of work and domestic care, which exhausted women can spoil the proverbial mother luck – once and now. In the « Care work » section, people also remind you who cost the career to meet the career by poverty. The mother and child are dying in a picture of Marta Worringer from 1924, a proletarian mother is drawn from Käthe Kollwitz.

Object and epoch mix

The Düsseldorf show corresponds to a commonly dilapidated relevant questions that are common today and is very popular with exhibition houses and the audience, which would also be well dealt with in non -fiction or symposia. Well-striking exhibits-in « Mama » this ranges from an early electrical breast pump to propaganda for the Nazi mother cult or milk powder advertising-does not contextualize the works of art, but take them into service to certify and illustrate concepts.

This associative cross -media process can be stimulating, but also confusing and arbitrary. At the moment, two Viennese offers, « G*Tt. The big questions between heaven and earth » in the Jewish Museum and the chamber music, precise exhibition « in all friendship » in the cathedral museum, currently show how sensitive and theme.

Transfiguration and discipline

With recognizable commitment, the curators of « Mama » have developed a topic catalog along the contradictions between the transfiguration and discipline of mothers, which is intended to clarify and encourage them today. Spatial title and clever wall texts reveal potential for discussion as to whether « (K) get a child » or « Council and Rule » – with the case of self -optimization as the current state of advice literature. In the section « Places of Maternity », a meticulously painted Biedermeier family idyll argues that the domestic setting also has an assignment of the non -public space and thus a restriction of freedom. A series of Katharina Bosse sets a strong contra: the photographer stages herself in the sunlight, naked and lasciviously with her baby on the body through forest and meadow.

The exhibition also scores with contemporary photo art, sometimes drastic, more satirical. The Finnin Judith seed stages, for example, as a mother who fixes an infant with the left hand and tries to cut through a bread ray with the right, i.e. one hand (see illustration). The steamed color and the blue and white Delert tiles? They are reminiscent of the maid at Vermeer.

« Mom – from Maria to Merkel », Art Palace Düsseldorf, until August 3