Winter 2024, E Williamsburg. As I walk, I fall and catch myself, in a rhythmic sequence. A steady movement into the unknown in manageable sequences. Painting while walking, I thought. I walk and drag a broom, soaked in ink, alongside me. I sow iridescent drops onto the sheets of paper. Painting like tilling a field, I thought. Already, I’ve reached the end of the room. I fold the paper to open the still-covered sections. A format far too wide for my studio floor. An exercise in the absence of an overview, drawn from memory. I retrace the paths again and in many layers. It’s almost spring. I have to leave the apartment and the studio, and return to Munich. The painting lies lightly folded into a package measuring about 60 × 35 × 8 cm in the small storage unit in Two Bridges, Manhattan.

Then in the summer, for my final crit at Bard College, I open it in front of the roughly one hundred students and faculty members present. It tells of the temporalities and the material conditions of its creation. The Fold. I don’t have to say anything. It reveals its principle.

It lies there for a while, still unfinished, half-open, in Munich, in my studio on Gabelsberger Strasse. A few confused strokes. My back hurts. I fold it back up. Then in the fall, it travels with me in an IKEA bag to Cologne, I am Artist in Residence. The studio apartment in the Südstadt has a very large, very shaky wooden table in the middle. It could seat 25 people. I drape the painting over the tabletop like a tablecloth and make a frottage with red pigment.
I paint circles around a few blue plates from the kitchen cabinet. Then on to Munich and on to Vienna. It’s winter again. Organic ink loops become solid rings of iron mica. They are places of rest. From here, I can reorient myself in all directions, they become hubs. The herringbone parquet shows through in some places.

I finish the painting and cut it into two parts for the exhibition. It is installed in two adjacent rooms, separated by a thick wall. Standing in the doorway, I can see the painting almost in its entirety for the very first time.

– Maria VMier

Maria VMier (b. 1985 in Passau, DE) lives and works in New York and Munich. VMier’s large-scale drawings push abstraction to its limits. Her spectral mark-making oscillates between the raw and the delicate, evoking bodies in perpetual motion. Through an insistently physical approach, VMier transforms abstraction into a site for examining embodied knowledge, desire, and socio-political relations from a xecofeminist perspective.

The multidisciplinary practice of Maria VMier encompasses context-specific and collaborative work. Influenced by body politics, their work addresses the centrality of desire – with an eye towards its feminist and political dimensions. VMier’s painting practice is open and process-based. Their forms begin in their Companion series, as they build up intuitive writing gestures into large-format paintings. Their lines – ebullient and dense – create a sense of three-dimensional depth that echoes sculptural forms like the figura serpentinata, a spiral motif prominent in Renaissance art. Their works emerge over time, layering and weaving the strands together. During this process, the format isn’t fixed: VMier folds the paper, cuts it up or extends it.

Following their studies at Bard College and the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, Maria VMier has had prominent presentations at MoMA PS1, Museum Brandhorst, and the Pinakothek der Moderne (all 2024), amongst others. Their practice is grounded in community and collaboration: they regularly invite further artists into their work, they run the artists’ book publisher Hammann von Mier-Verlag with Stefanie Hammann, and are also part of the collective Ruine München.

Works by Maria VMier are held in the public collections of Museum Brandhorst, Munich; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

Nicole Wermers (b. 1971, Emsdetten, DE) lives and works in London. For over two decades, Nicole Wermers has explored the physical and structural hierarchies of urban space in relation to the bodies – both present and absent – subjected by them, drawing on references from art history and vernacular culture.

Her characteristically evocative and slyly humorous work often challenge the classical – and male-associated – vertical trajectory of sculpture. Combining and reconfiguring familiar objects into new material forms, Wermers addresses the structures of ritualised social relations and the material objects through which these associations are communicated. These works transform, contain, and frame their environment, prompting a deeper consideration of how surface and design read as social and cultural indicators.

In 2024 Wermers was the recipient of the Helmut-Kraft-Foundation Prize for Fine Arts as well as the Arts Council Acquisition Prize. She has been awarded the Rome Prize of the German Academy Villa Massimo, Rome in 2012. In 2015, Wermers was nominated for the Turner Prize. Since 2017 she has been a professor for sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and commissions at Tate Britain, London, UK; Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland; The Common Guild, Glasgow, UK; Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore, Ireland; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, USA; Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany; Villa Massimo German Academy, Rome; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; Camden Arts Centre, London, UK and Secession, Vienna, Austria among others.

Wermers’ works are in the public collections of Tate, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Sammlung Verbund, Vienna; Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, California; Galerie der Gegenwart/ Kunsthalle Hamburg; Sammlung Stiftung Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Bern; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Berlin; Government Art Collection, London; British Council Collection, London; Arts Council Collection, London/New York City; Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Karl-Ernst Osthaus Museum, City of Hagen; DGZ Bank Collection, Düsseldorf; Sammlung Museum Weserburg, Bremen, DE, Museum Brandhorst, Munich and Fondazione Halevim, Milano.