Jeanette Mundt
Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce Jeanette Mundt at WINDOW, the first solo exhibition of the New York based artist’s work with the gallery. Mundt’s omnivorous painting practice draws from a wide range of sources: popular film and television, personal photographs, and the art historical canon. At the Kern WINDOW space, Paul Cézanne’s A Modern Olympia (c. 1873–74) is her key reference point. Known for her nuanced examinations of the body and self-portraiture, Mundt engages with Cézanne’s figure as a site for painterly and conceptual reimagining. Across WINDOW’s two street-facing vitrines, the figure is evoked, but not through likeness. Olympia appears through repeated, fractured gestures, never fully surfacing. She hovers just at the threshold of recognition, emerging briefly before dissolving into a mercurial field of colors, marks, and movements.
Materiality and surface are central to Mundt’s process. Thick layers of romantic-hued pigments collide into one another (a sensibility that recalls the work of Joan Mitchell); passages of color are smeared, scraped, or pulled apart; and lifting and abrasion create a charged interplay between control and chance. In developing the Olympia works, Mundt was drawn to the surface of Sam Gilliam’s Whirlirama (collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), especially the traces left behind when plastic sheeting pressed onto wet paint was applied then peeled off the canvas. This method exposes, moves and changes the forms of both wet and already partially dried paint.
Moving between multiple canvases at once in her DUMBO studio, Mundt creates a dispersed but connected network of Olympias. This concurrent mode of working allows for doublings, slippages, and echos, as very similar but not quite identical iterations of the figure surface across the series. A single painting might contain two versions of the same form, while a group of other canvases might register shared impressions. The Olympia, whether appearing, disappearing, or returning is always made by Mundt’s layered choreography of transfer, pressure, and redirection. The very-wet oil surface she enjoys working in is perfect for recording these moments of touch and abrasion.
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Jeanette Mundt