Sanja Iveković (born 1949 in Zagreb), Ulrike Rosenbach (born 1943 in Bad Salzdetfurth) and Gabriele Stötzer (born 1953 in Emleben) have taken radical artistic positions since the 1970s. Independently of each other, in the very different political contexts of their countries of origin, they developed a visual language that criticized common gender roles and the associated cultural norms.

The focus of their work is always the woman: for Rosenbach and Stötzer, the female body functions as a means of expression. They use it as a canvas or to break out of their boundaries through movement. Through her works, Iveković condemns the objectification of women's bodies and the associated projection surface for gender attributions.

The artists use a wide variety of media such as performance, photography, textiles, writing, painting and film to denounce gender assignments and counteract common images with their owns: sometimes loudly in large-scale actions, sometimes quietly in intimate moments, but always with a clear message.

Based on their own biographies, they create works in which they address the relationship between history and the present against the background of their female identity. To do this, they sometimes resort to rigorous artistic methods and demonstrate new possibilities of expression that have become groundbreaking for many areas of contemporary political art.

The exhibition presents photographs, video works, performances and installations from the beginning of the work of Ulrike Rosenbach, Gabriele Stötzer and Sanja Iveković as well as more recent works.

After initially working as a city planner in Berlin, Ulrich Wüst (*1949) was drawn to photography at the end of the 1970s. For him it becomes a means of subjective understanding about life in the former GDR. In photography he finds concentration and expression in order to bind his observations into the thoughts and emotions that trigger them.

Here he manages to precisely capture what everyday life drowns out. What is striking is the silence that surrounds all of his motifs, like the deserted streets in Magdeburg or Berlin. His motifs often appear as if they have been removed from the passage of time, destined to survive as photographs. The photographer's special sensitivity to contemporary historical processes and the changes that accompany them are expressed.

Born in Magdeburg, he developed a completely independent scenic view at an early age. Initially focused on personal documentation, he soon created a large number of his typical black-and-white photographs of streets and buildings with a generalized view of the city, its beauty and transience, its deformations and impositions.

Over the years, Ulrich Wüst also turns to the inventory that people hang on to, consisting of found objects or everyday images that he happens to come across. He is interested in interpreting the traces and signs of the past from today's perspective. Ulrich Wüst is obviously interested in concentrating the means of photography in the expression of these series, which leads to surprising narratives that oscillate somewhere between still life and abstract painting. From the 1990s onwards, a less well-known experimental tendency can be seen in Ulrich Wüst's work, which extends into the current picture themes.

With the selected series of images, the exhibition draws a wide arc through the extensive photographic work of Ulrich Wüst, winner of the 2021 Art Prize of the State of Saxony-Anhalt.

Supported by:

House facades, street canyons, vehicles and pavements. Since the early 2000s, the Belgian artist Koen van den Broek has made the urban present the subject of his paintings. With ease, he moves along the borders of abstraction and depiction of reality.

His works show very unique excerpts from initially inconspicuous, deserted places: the addition of a few details turns abstract surfaces into magnificent streets; kerbstones and shadows become compositional pictorial means and generous monochrome use of colour direct the gaze of the viewers. Despite the absence of people, their presence can be felt in the works: circus tents, motorways, bridges, sewers, pipes, fragments of houses or cars. As if of their own accord, his paintings zoom in on these motifs, arrange and compose colours, light and shadows and lead the painter again and again to abstraction. Playfulness, diversity and duality - rigid demarcation versus wild brushstrokes, depth versus surface - are characteristic of his paintings.

The exhibition in the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg shows a cross-section of Koen van den Broek's paintings from 1998 to the present. For the first time, the painter's oeuvre can be seen in its entirety in a German art museum.

Koen van den Broek (*1973 in Bree, Belgium) first studied architecture and then painting at the Royal Academy of Antwerp and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Breda. His works are presented in solo and group exhibitions in Europe, North America and Asia and can be found in collections of among others the Astrup Fearnley Museet (Oslo), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SMAK (Gent) and Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp.

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A window overlooking pedestrian and vehicular traffic on a street corner. “Worst Case Scenario” consists of a collection of still images that show daily life on a Viennese street corner and only begin to move carefully as the scene progresses.

The exhibition presents international positions from photography, video art and installations that are currently involved in the debate about power and the effects of power, and artists who take a stand in terms of responsible humanity.

Monika Huber studierte Malerei an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste München bei Günter Fruhtrunk. Sie schloss 1985 das Studium mit dem Meisterschülerdiplom für Malerei und Grafik ab. Ihre Arbeiten werden seit 1983 in zahlreichen Galerie-Ausstellungen, Museumspräsentationen, architekturbezogenen Installationen und öffentlichen Interventionen gezeigt. Monika Huber lebt und arbeitet in München.

Zandile Tshabalala's paintings tell stories of lightness, strength and self-confidence - of women like her in the 2020s: young and black.

Als die Fotografin Susan Meiselas 1979 in Nicaragua den Auslöser ihrer Kamera drückte und einen Mann einfing, der in der linken Hand das Gewehr, mit der rechten einen Molotow-Cocktail warf, schuf sie ein Kultbild der Revolution, das über die Jahrzehnte zu einem internationalen Symbolbild gegen Unterdrückung geworden ist, fest verankert im kollektiven Bildgedächtnis unserer Zeit und massenhaft reproduziert.