Monika Brandmeier in the Mathias Güntner Gallery: A minimalist gone astray

Drawer out, broom on

But then this photograph with the laconic title “Cupboard and Broom” reveals its wit and charm. The viewer enters into visual exegesis. The drawer comes out, the broom leans back, aha! The two light switches next to them also enter into a formal exchange, because the signage on the drawer fronts is sometimes empty, sometimes filled and also arranged in groups of two. It could go on like this, connections all over the place.

Monika Brandmeier is an artist for a second look; you should approach her works slowly, ideally circle around them, because she is actually a sculptor, not a photographer. But already in her photographs there is so much joy in spatial vision that one is immediately sucked into her idiosyncratic analyzes of what body, emptiness, surrounding space is.

Your exhibition at the Mathias Güntner Gallery has the cryptic title “Diffuse Space (with Sharp Edges)” and yet fits in with the main work “Various Corners” in the entrance. Two folded aluminum plates face each other and form a space that is open at two corners. Greenish dustings, such as those used to clean industrial halls and workshops, are scattered on the floor.

On the one hand a clear edge, on the other hand there are sprinkles around it: the comparison shows Monika Brandmeier as a minimalist on the wrong track. Despite their sobriety, there is a poetry inherent in her works, as her exhibition titles reveal.

“A tropical atmosphere, just a lot cooler” was the name of her exhibition in the Spandau Citadel five years ago. Her sculptures are like a poem, explains the sculptor, who has been teaching at the University of Fine Arts in Dresden since 2001. You have to read it several times to reveal the different levels.

For example, there is the zinc sheet that is held on the wall with an extended hook and turns away slightly. “Gap” is the title of this tricky work, in which the artist is concerned with exactly that gap between the wall and the sheet metal. As with Bruce Nauman’s cramped corridors through which the US artist sends his audience, as a visitor you also develop a physical relationship with the space in between.

Monika Brandmeier confidently takes on the greats of sculpture, a field that is still predominantly occupied by men. With the light blue painted square tube, which bears the title “Arm” because it protrudes forward like the arm of a crane, she refers to Joseph Beuys and his oft-quoted sentence “I think with my knee anyway.” For her, the sculpture is mounted exactly at knee height, which she says is more pleasant for her.

Like the zinc sheet, the “arm” is also held on the wall by a hook, which the artist obviously has a weakness for. This makes the difficult things easy, the fundamental things playful. The gallery itself also bridges contrasts: a small room that shows great art. Gallerist Mathias Güntner also coordinates the two contradictory locations of Hamburg and Berlin. In Hamburg he has been sitting on the third floor of the Galeriehaus on Fleetinsel for twenty years; visitors come by very sparingly.

He wandered into Berlin five years ago by chance looking for a temporary exhibition space for the Gallery Weekend and then stayed, delighted by the atmosphere of the shop near Savignyplatz. Here there is a walking audience, here people ask questions and discuss the art, while in Hamburg, after the artist’s introductory words, people prefer to turn to the soft drink in a distinguished manner. But the money is made in the Hanseatic city. “Berlin has a different currency,” the gallery owner puts it diplomatically, which also pays off.