maria und marie · women. voices. roles.

maria and marie represent examples of different images of women figures that have developed over the centuries in different social and historical settings.

in paintings, religious and secular literature, in theatre, opera texts and also in contemporary media,  women characters are to be found which, in ›condensed‹ form incarnate female roles with specific character traits, attitudes and habits. these, either developed into role models, or, on occasion, became clichés. maria and marie symbolically mark two extreme female roles: maria on the one hand, the innocent, the holy, the spiritual, and on the other, marie the sensual, the  ecstatic, the seductress.

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what distinguishes the work of edith urban is the pre-dominant use of words, texts, or text fragments in her work.

reflexions, dialogues, provocative or descriptive statements, mostly from literary texts, are continuously written into, painted over, washed out, before being rewritten into the once monochrome paintings but which now have become increasingly striped.

the selected works stem from various cycles, in which the voices of different women have become audible: fragments of heiner müller’s hamletmaschine, for instance, form the basis of a series  of works relating to the figure of orphelia – vigorously reinterpreted by müller.

in this way a multitude of eternally emblematic thoughts and feelings are taken up and developed: sadness, hope, pain, yearning, despair, hatred and desire. often, only parts of the texts remain  visible, and yet it is through the openness of these fragments that the viewer comes to his or her own personal interpretation.

ulrich meyer-husmann, curator