Monika Baer was awarded the Hannah Höch Prize 2020 by the State of Berlin and, on this occasion, currently presents a new constellation of large-format paintings and small-format collages at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.). On the occasion of the exhibition and upon the artist’s initiative the first German-language edition of the essay “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” (1988) by Griselda Pollock, a pioneer of feminist art history and theory, has been published in the series n.b.k. Diskurs. In her examination of the artistic practice of women Impressionist painters, Pollock offers a brilliant analysis of class and gender relations since the end of the 19th century whose effects can be felt to this day. As part of a series of exhibition talks, Monika Baer discusses her artistic practice, the current exhibition at n.b.k., as well as the presence of feminist art history with Susanne Leeb and Griselda Pollock.

Monika Baer (*1964 in Freiburg im Breisgau, lives and works in Berlin since 1999) studied painting at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She currently teaches at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. She was a Regents’ Lecturer at the University of California in Los Angeles in 2018–2019, and previously a professor at Bard College in New York. Solo exhibitions (selection): Kunstmuseum Bonn (2019); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2016); Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2016); Art Institute of Chicago (2013); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2006); Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2005).

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds. She has worked at the Universities of Reading, Manchester and Leeds, and has just completed 43 years of dedicated teaching and research. She is the 2020 Laureate of the Holberg Prize, awarded for her work on feminism and art’s histories. A social and feminist historian of art she is also a transdisciplinary cultural analyst focussing in cultural studies and Jewish studies. She has been developing an international, queer, postcolonial, feminist analysis of art’s diverse histories, focussing increasingly on the formulation of new concepts with which to deliver “feminist interventions in art’s histories.“

Susanne Leeb lives in Berlin and works as an art historian. She is Professor for Contemporary Art at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. In 2007 she earned her PhD in Frankfurt/Oder with the thesis Die Kunst der Anderen. Weltkunst und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne. Leeb is co-editor of the book series Polypen at b_books, Berlin, and a member of the advisory board of Texte zur Kunst, where she participated in the conception of the thematic focuses "History", "Idiom – Languages of Art", "They are us" and "Property". In her essay "Liquid Gazes (On contemporary Painting)", in: Aesthetics of the Flesh, ed. by Felix Ensslin and Charlotte Klink (2014), she discusses the work of Monika Baer.