six
women
concrete
?
Inge Dick, Rosa M Hessling, Maria Lalić,
Marile Holzner, Angelika Huber, Eunji Seo
Exhibition at Galerie Renate Bender, Munich
January 10th to March 15th, 2025
It was from September 7 to October 10, 1995, that I showed the exhibition “three women concrete?” with works by Inge Dick, Rosa M Hessling and Maria Lalić in my new premises on Hohenzollernstraße in Munich.
Since the very beginning, following the founding of my Gallery in 1987, I became more and more interested in Concrete-Constructivist Art. The reason for this was my contact to the concrete poet Eugen Gomringer and exposure to his not yet installed collection in the future Museum for Concrete Art in Ingolstadt. For the Gallery, the first big step in this direction was presenting Gomringer’s collection at the then empty Riemerschmid factory on the Prater Island in Munich in 1991 – on my own initiative and at my own expense. In order to achieve – if not a commercial success, then at least a cost recovery – I compiled an exhibition of the graphic works of the artists in the collection. This resulted in contacts to colleagues and publishing houses featuring Concrete Art in the field of graphic arts or directly to those artists who were still alive. The exhibition, which was shown also in the Museum Ulm, was a great success.
There followed an almost four-year gallery partnership in Schwabing, during which Rosa M Hessling, among other artists, was featured in 1993. The wish to concentrate on concrete, monochrome and minimalist forms of contemporary art led to the decision to open my own gallery premises on Hohenzollernstr. 122 in September 1995 with the exhibition “three women concrete?”
Despite the not always easy times in the art gallery sector, and especially with my particular focus, I look back with pleasure and pride on over 150 exhibitions. After a short period on Maximilianstraße, the Gallery has been located since 2014 on Türkenstraße in the Munich Art Quarter.
It is with great pleasure that after 30 years I can present in January 2025 the exhibition “six women concrete?” with the three original artists, Inge Dick, Rosa M Hessling and Maria Lalić, together with three representatives of a new generation of artists who also work with a greatly reduced formal language: Marile Holzner, Angelika Huber and Eunji Seo. And so this artistic movement continues to develop in an innovative manner – as was recently demonstrated in the large exhibition “24! Questions for the Concrete Present” at the Museum for Concrete Art in Ingolstadt.
Renate Bender
