Monica Majoli at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen Düsseldorf

Starting from the idea of the artist as lover, Monica Majoli’s exhibition Distant Lover 2009–2024 traces the artist’s long-term engagement with questions of the body, desire, and memory. Informed by experiences of HIV and AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s, Majoli explores intimacy and corporeality as proof of physical presence, and as a possibility for projection, encounter, and empathy. Her work consistently examines the body as a site that produces desire and pleasure but is also marked by fleetingness and transience, and in which both of these aspects are always inherently connected to each other.

In Distant Lover 2009–2024, body, document, and fictional image enter into close relation: while Majoli’s portraits are fictional, they are based on photographs of real people or real encounters from the past, giving them the character of a testimony, a document, a memento, or an obituary. While some of her portraits are explicitly autobiographical, capturing intimate encounters with former lovers (Black Mirror), others are based on found erotic photographs taken from queer ‘physique’ magazines of the 1970s and ’80s (Blueboys, Olympus). These images are characterized by great tenderness and intimacy, while at times they are more directly erotic – their affective presence stands in deliberate contrast to the fact that many of those pictured would die of AIDSonly a decade later. Majoli’s portraits, in this sense, are also an attempt to make present what is absent, and to make it live on as an artistic document or artifact.

Majoli’s exploration of notions of intimacy is also transposed into the physical process of image-making. Her white-line woodcut prints are created using a simplified version of the traditional Japanese mokuhanga technique, producing moments of physical imprint and transfer between the (depicted) body and the hand of the artist. The psychological connotations inherent in the term “imprint” also suggest this is a search for moments of affection and of being affected – it indicates a deep artistic involvement with images and images of bodies that have imprinted themselves in the artist’s memory and want to be preserved. Majoli expands this into a wider exploration of how images are able to create a sense of presence – how they encounter, confront, and “approach” us as viewers, but also how they challenge our gazes and desires and make them visible.

A tension can be felt throughout the exhibition, between what is permanent and enduring and what is only temporary and transient: while Majoli’s works are always preceded by studies produced over multiple years, the moments of bodily presence they record are always fleeting. The newly conceived work cycle Olympus (2024) marks the center of this engagement: It is based on the eponymous 1970s queer erotic magazine, which restaged images of bodies from antiquity in an attempt to open up new spaces for desire and allow for a more holistic view of classical ideals of masculinity. Acting as a deliberate counterpoint to the supposed universality and dominance of the canonical body, Olympus is a haunting reflection on the vulnerability and evanescence of the body, and on the deeply emotional significance of time for our physical existence.

Various public events will accompany the exhibition. Monica Majoli will give an artist’s talk on her extensive archive of magazines, ephemera, and photographs, which have influenced and contextualized her work over the last 15 years. The art critic and curator Sabrina Tarasoff, who has published several texts on Majoli, will give a further lecture on the artist’s work.