Artist: Megan Francis Sullivan
Exhibition title: Begegnungsbilder
Curated by: Moritz Scheper
Venue: Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, Germany
Date: May 4 – July 7, 2019
Photography: All images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Philipp Kurzhals/Neuer Essener Kunstverein
In her work, Megan Francis Sullivan arranges „new neighborhoods“ between artworks, elements of art/history and social spaces. At the center of her approach is a sensibility for architectonic, spatial, and historical contexts in which she exhibits and navigates by means of reproductions of selected artworks or objects. Here she carries out a sort of complaisance: an immersion in the working methods of other artists, in which one’s own identity seems to disappear and yet only thereby finds its peculiarity.
Begegnungsbilder, Sullivan’s exhibition at the Neuer Essener Kunstverein, addresses the slow introduction of the figure of the worker into painting, but at the same time also questions decisions about the accessibility of works of art. What is shown, what is stored? And to what extent are such decisions related to possible forms of a commemorative culture in which work would be understood as a struggle for political as well as symbolic visibility?
