Priska von Martin: The woman in the shade

It is actually a re-discovery, which is now in the Museum for New art in Freiburg. Priska von Martin, in 1912, there was born, studied as one of only two women from 1931 to sculpture at the Munich art Academy, where she learned the technique of bronze casting. For your work you are henceforth focused on the lost wax process, in which a complicated process is a model of clay, wax or plaster into Bronze is to be transferred, which can then be post-processed. It accounts for the characteristic appearance of Priska of Martin's works, that you missed them is not a polished smoothness, but they largely raw leaves.

Rose-Maria Gropp

editor in the features section, responsible for the "art market".

the allure of your small sculptures, mostly animals, often horses, you are from Childhood loved, and some with Riding, such as merged into a single body. You have, as it were, picturesque surfaces with their abandoned seams and cracks, which are also signs of vulnerability. In them the Process of creation is preserved, and captured so well the movement, you are just still made. Of a strange moving beauty of the Torso of a rather large, schrundigen "Floating reindeer," which disappears under the body in a rusty iron plate, while it seems to keep his head up bravely to the top. Priska von Martin, has left a closed OEuvre, and none of the developments to read would be, rather, it is characterized by jumps, unexpected Change.

fixed points, in addition to the animals, again and again, the woman's body. The exhibition shows her Work, accompanied by many photographs, taken from the estate of the artist, the Museum preserves. It is obvious that your first Create, in the forties and fifties, closely related to its time of origin is bound. It is based on the major Sculptors among the predecessors such as Auguste Rodin or Aristide Maillol, and is influenced by the work of the German sculptor Toni Stadler (1888 to 1982). Stadler was her teacher; she married him in 1942. It is known that he was appreciated in the Nazi era and that this remained after 1945; in 1955, Stadler was a participant at the first Documenta in Kassel. Maybe that's part of as the shadow to Priska from Martins biography, you will increasingly their own Creator.

That you yourself learned quite a Phase of recognition, evidenced by an article in the journal "The work of art" from 1955 to the subject of contemporary sculpture. There Priska von Martin, is mentioned in the Sculptor, together with Renée Sintenis, Germaine Richier, Barbara Hepworth. It has remained the least known. This is not least because hardly any Work came on the art market, it was apparently difficult for them. In the sixties they increasingly devoted to the topic of the plastic female acts. It free strong volumes, archaic by the end of torsos grace, in the early animal sculptures are similar. As a further liberation force full drawings and stand-alone collages are added, sometimes with fragments of photographs.

in Front of the stone Scenes of the city

And as a idiosyncratic Echo in the Pop Art are the life-size chalk drawings of naked women, the wooden scaffolding is supported, Together with the film-maker and photographer Bernhard Dörries on your seventeen "Red girl" in public places, in the empty dawn, in Munich, in front of the stone Scenes of the city. Of these actions only Dörries’ photographs are in the Museum on a Monitor is presented. Because of their wild, blood-red silhouettes burned Priska von Martin.

time life suffered the artist to depression and nerve pain, which forced to create them always breaks. After the diagnosis that you would make muscle atrophy increasingly unable to move, she took in 1982, after an exhibition opening, with works in a Munich gallery, and a few days after her seventieth birthday, the life.