Künstlerinnen in Expressionismus und Fluxus - Tell these people who I am

In the organizer's words:

Female artists are still much less present in exhibitions and collections than their male counterparts. For this reason, the Museum Ostwall in the Dortmunder U will be showing female artists in Expressionism and Fluxus from October 25.

The Museum Ostwall in the Dortmunder U is exploring its collection and its gaps. The special exhibition "Tell these people who I am - female artists in Expressionism and Fluxus" is inspired by the focal points of the museum's own collection and shows works by 30 female artists from two periods of the 20th century on the sixth floor of the Dortmunder U.

Exhibition in two parts

The exhibition will be accessible in two parts: "...a self-evident inner must" - Eight female expressionists celebrates the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk and revels in the wide range of materials and materials with which the artists from this era worked and thus expanded the concept of art. The Fluxus and Feminismsection examinesthe era of emerging feminism and global networking, in which women were still severely restricted in their ability to realize themselves artistically.

Discovering eight female expressionists in Dortmund

"For me, my work is nothing more than a self-evident inner must", said Renée Sintenis in 1931. When she was already one of the most successful sculptors of the Weimar Republic, art critics still ridiculed her work and condescendingly attested to her "craftsmanship". Yet after the First World War, new possibilities of expression opened up for female artists using techniques that were still unusual in the art world, as the exhibition shows: Lotte Reiniger worked with silhouettes, animation and film, Madame d'Ora with photography. Kitty Rix and her teacher Vally Wieselthier turned to ceramics and Marta Worringer to textile art. Emma Schlangenhausen as a graphic artist and Else Berg as a painter used established techniques for new stylistic experiments.

"Tell these people who I am", wrote Vally Wieselthier in a telegram to Franklin D. Roosevelt at the end of the 1930s. Roosevelt, demanding attention for herself and other women. However, none of the eight female expressionist artists exhibited ever achieved the fame of their male contemporaries. However, the high quality of their artistic work made them role models for their female colleagues. Their works have been researched for several years and can now be discovered in Dortmund.

How free was Fluxus for women in art?

"Fluxus can be lots of fun when the boys let you on their boat," jokes Carolee Schneemann bitterly. The supposedly free and open art form was less free and open when it came to who belonged and who did not. The physical performer Schneemann, for example, whose works focus on "male gauze", was not accepted into the circle of the leading Fluxus artists. Yet the female artists of the 1970s were far ahead of their time, such as Ana Mendieta, who documents how she glues a friend's beard to her face in "Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant)".

Leticía Parente, Martha Rosler and Mieko Shiomi comment on social role expectations of women in their artistic works on domestic and care work. The gender-specific segregation of labour problematized by the women's movement was particularly undermined by artist couples from the Fluxus context: the bonds between Yoko Ono and John Lennon, Dorothy Iannone and Dieter Roth, Shigeko Kubota and Nam June Paik as well as Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins are reflected in their artistic work, in collaborative projects that had their love relationships as a source of inspiration.