Das Lokale ist nicht lokal

Maximiliane Baumgartner’s works combine elements of painting, radical pedagogy, and artistic research. Her memory work opens up spaces of encounter, intergenerational exchange, and practical references to history and its blindspots. Based on the thesis “Das Lokale ist nicht lokal“ (The local is not local), Baumgartner’s most recent works investigate the lives and works of women artists from the so-called “lost generation” as documents of their time. Many of these figures share the experience of being the first generation of women artists to be admitted to German art academies, and they often worked on the national (not just local) level. Yet, their lives and work were interrupted by the Second World War and National Socialism, occasionally suppressed by exhibition bans and defamed as degenerate. After 1945, their works remained largely ignored in the national discourse. In the course of her Marianne Defet Painting Scholarship, Baumgartner studied the work of Nuremberg artist Dore Meyer-Vax (1908–1980) in this context. Meyer-Vax trained as a printmaker at the Kunstgewerbeschule Nuremberg before transferring to the art academy in Berlin in 1929, and shortly afterwards she also pursued her studies in the studios of various artists, including Karl Hofer among others. This was the environment where she met her future husband Walter Meyer and became part of an artistic scene around Felka Platek and Felix Nussbaum. From 1933 on, there were no longer any opportunities for her to exhibit, so Meyer-Vax left Berlin in 1939 and returned to Nuremberg, where she was employed as a technical draughtswoman at the transformer factory. Shortly after the war’s end, she joined the communist party (KPD), which was soon banned, and became one of the founding members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. During this time, her political commitments were reflected in numerous works as well as political campaigns. From the 1950s on, Meyer-Vax was entrusted with a series of commissions for public spaces in Nuremberg and designed or executed murals for the youth library, schools, the state theater, and the zoo, among others. In several series of drawings and paintings, Baumgartner responds to these social sites and the democratic pictorial approach of Meyer-Vax’s works. In addition to political commentaries on the events of her time, Meyer-Vax repeatedly depicted situations of collective learning and solidarity as well as moments of exhaustion, which Baumgartner reconsiders in the context of today’s socio-political debates and her own situated perspective. In her painterly process of “looking at pictures through pictures,” Baumgartner points out historical gaps without trying to fill them. She also establishes a connection to the Freiburg artist Eva Eisenlohr (1891–1977), who was affected by similar patriarchal and political mechanisms of ignorance and active forgetting. In the process, Baumgartner makes the works of both artists legible within an expanded discursive space: The local is not local. As the title of the series “Von einem Punkt aus der Vergangenheit, einen Punkt aus der Gegenwart malen“ (Re-painting the threads of the past) on display suggests, Baumgartner makes temporal connections and critical commentaries, the perspective of which she expands by activating various groups in Nuremberg. To this end, she will initiate a series of actions over the course of the exhibition, which various groups and the public are invited to participate in. The opening of the exhibition “Das Lokale ist nicht lokal“ thus marks the beginning of these processes of getting to know each other and working together.