Beautiful Disasters, solo exhibition by Conny Maier, curated by Udo Kittelmann at the Langen Foundation

The Langen Foundation is pleased to present Beautiful Disasters, Conny Maier's first comprehensive institutional exhibition. The exhibition will be on display from 3 September 2023 through 7 April 2024 at the former NATO base in Hombroich, which housed Pershing missiles during the Cold War. Curated by Udo Kittelmann, who has frequently worked with Maier, the show will be made up of a series of images created especially for this exhibition and of the artist’s earlier works.

Maier’s large-scale paintings reflect on the polarities of dominance and submission, equilibrium and instability, the human and the non-human. In Beautiful Disasters, she responds to 21st century questions of immoderation and fundamental distrust of reason with relentlessly colorful answers. Misshapen figures, seen with wide open mouths and gelatinous appendages, often multi-breasted and donned in malformed headdresses, wander through her canvases in vivid, sweeping brush strokes. Her compositions oscillate between fascination and repulsion, beauty and the grotesque, to depict life beyond the expected. Considered together, Maier’s abstractions offer an unflinching look at the end of the Holocene and the realities of our new age and ask what kind of a new day might dawn. 

Also on display in the Japan Room is the Langen Foundation’s collection of ink scroll paintings and pictures of the seasons from the Edo Period (1603-1868), a golden era of Japanese art. The exhibit includes landscape ink paintings of seasonal flowers, plants, and wildlife that represent the stylistic diversity and magnificence of the period.

About Conny Maier

Conny Maier lives and works in Berlin and Baleal, Portugal. She was one of three recipients of Deutsche Bank’s prestigious Artists of the Year award in 2021. In September 2023, she will show a large-scale solo exhibition at Langen Foundation, Neuss, and recently exhibited in solo and group shows at venues including de 11 Lijnen, Oudenburg; Palais Populaire, Berlin; MUDEC, Milan; and THE KING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE QUEEN, curated by Udo Kittelmann at Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden. Maier has exhibited internationally, including Where have all the flowers gone? De 11 Lijnen, Belgium (2022); Feels like rabies, Société, Berlin (2022); Grenzgänge 2, König Galerie, Seoul (2021); Grenzgänge, Ruttkowski; 68, Cologne (2021); Die Zähmung, Kunstverein Heppenheim (2020); Domestic, König Galerie, Berlin (2020); Am Rothenbaum, Ruttkowski;68, Paris (2018); A. Tennis, Parallel Vienna, Vienna (2017); Coke First PT.II, BOLD Room, Los Angeles (2016); and many other group exhibitions at several institutions.