Maximiliane Baumgartner’s Charitable Counter-Images

While education may currently be a prevalent theme in contemporary art, few projects comprise more than simple social critique nor outlast the exhibition’s run. Maximiliane Baumgartner, by contrast, has long been exploring this field in works such as her mobile art-education project Der Fahrende Raum (The Driving Space, 2015–19). All the more interesting, then, to see how clearly the artist’s latest exhibition at Max Mayer, ‘Wie Du mir, so teil ich Dir (Tit for Tat)’, plays on the fact that her subject matter is now a hot topic.

The show consists of ten paintings on aluminium panels, loosely shaped to fit the angular exhibition space, their colours and compositions marking them as five pairs. Each pair is based on the replication of an engraving, painted upside-down in quick strokes by Baumgartner, devised by 18th century graphic artist Daniel Chodowiecki to illustrate Johann Bernhard Basedow’s seminal work of pedagogy, Elementarwerk (Elementary Book, 1774). Shot through with bourgeois moral codes, double standards and smug philanthropy, the text has nevertheless had a widespread effect on pedological thinking in the German-speaking world.

Baumgartner overpaints these engravings – which, according to the exhibition literature, focus on ‘roots of play, the creation of poverty, the legal system and measuring systems’ – with boldly rendered ‘counter-images’. It becomes immediately apparent that every brushstroke is a symbolic action. Wie du mir, so teil ich dir (Tit for Tat) IV. Portrait of a Space Measurer as a Young Man (all works 2022), for example, overwrites Chodowiecki’s drawing of a lesson on the need to measure, divide up and claim space. The inverted original image in orange is overlaid with painterly ambience, a whirl of purples out of which the ‘space measurer’ re-emerges, this time in negative against a grey ground. Through this counter image, Baumgartner subtly links the decorous lesson depicted in the original to the ways it plays out in geopolitical terms: namely as conquest and colonial violence.

Another remarkable work, Wie du mir, so teil ich dir (Tit for Tat) I. Narrative and Bourgeois Structures of the Exclusive Space of Jurisprudence and Jur. Anita Augspurg in 1906 on her Way to Court where She Fights against Police Violence against Workers, is a drawing of an all-male courtroom scene, over which Baumgartner has painted in purple a female figure: Germany’s first female lawyer Anita Augspurg. Streaks of orange further auratize this figure of self-empowerment who has recurred in a number of the artist’s works.

The conceptual rigor of the show, and the artist’s heavy use of reference material, do not obscure her seasoned formalism, as she boldly marshals her palette, overstepping the mark in some places and unexpectedly holding back in others, always to the benefit of the image. In her work, figuration is not a dogma but a constantly dissolving mass that never claims supremacy over the abstract elements. In the diptych Wie du mir, so teil ich dir (Tit for Tat) III. The Narrative of the Giving Hand, for example, against an abstract background of steel-blue colour fields, thick lines in navy and yellow bite away at the foreground drawing.

Such a direct critique of historical educational theory might easily come across as unthinking if the artist’s own position were not reflected. Aware of this, Baumgartner brings herself into play as a product of pedagogical patterns and institutions by means of an entertaining trick: of each pair of pictures, only one is for sale, with its counterpart being donated to the places or people from which the artist received her education – her mother, her kindergarten and school, her art academy and a Munich-based association for women’s rights.

_{Translated by Nicholas Grindell}

Maximiliane Baumgartner’s ‘Wie Du mir, so teil ich Dir (tit for tat)’ is on view at Galerie Max Mayer until 22 October.

_{Main image: Maximiliane Baumgartner, ‘Wie Du mir, so teil ich Dir (Tit for Tat)’, 2022, exhibition view, Galerie Max Mayer, Dusseldorf. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Max Mayer, Dusseldorf}