Monika Baer: Defection

"Defection" brings together Monika Baer's most recent group of works and unfolds a pictorial universe that consistently moves to the edges of painterly language. The exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein (February 27 to May 3, 2026) shows series of paintings that enter into a neighborhood with earlier motif complexes without dissolving their tensions. Baer's canvases operate with the peculiar dialectic of frontality, materiality and staged movement that has characterized her work for decades. Two new types of painting form the core: the light purple primed Lavender Walls with pictograms carved into the coarse-grained plaster and the Schweine Steine Scherben paintings, whose purple-tinted, partly flesh-colored surfaces cut through brick walls like fragments. Both series interweave resistance and openness, as the motifs - from cloak to wall - appear as recurring figures of a painterly way of thinking that constantly wrestles with its own theatricality. Baer lays traces that remain precise and at the same time deliberately fragile, as if the pictures themselves were negotiating the relationship between illusion, material and the present. "Defection" is thus less a commentary than a seismogram of subtle tectonic shifts, which reveals an unexpected poetic energy in the austere frontality of the murals.