Jeanette Mundt : So this exhibition at TANK Shanghai, it's called “A Reality.” I started working on this exhibition in particular, about a year and a half ago directly following Art Basel last year. And I wanted right away to do a lot of flowers. I wanted it to be very, very vibrant, very energetic. And I've never shown in Shanghai before, so I was very excited and I wanted it to be like bold and exciting.

I wanted to present the series that I've been working on for a long time, or I had started this series “Right and  Not Accurate”  and then it was sort of morphing into another series that had flowers, playing a huge part in the painting alongside the body, in most cases, in front of the bodies. And I wanted to showcase that here. So really I delved into that series and I made a number of them. And here, I’m showing four of them. Four of this series called “Excessively Emotional & Lusty.” And this title comes from a book Caliban and the Witch by Sylvia Federici, who is a cultural analyst, basically. And that's kind of something that does happen in my work a lot. I take from cultural breakdowns. I find them very inspiring generally. 

So here this is a series of “Excessively Emotional & Lusty,” and it's my body in a space constructed, typically from Francis Bacon paintings as he had a very abstract approach to showing very figurative space. So I wanted to play with that. I often take very specifically from very iconic male painters, because I'm a female painter, and I like to sort of play with that energy and movement. So I took some spaces inspired by Francis Bacon paintings and put my body in them, and then put these flowers over them. So there's this play with foreground and background, very formal concepts in painting. So like foreground, background, layering. And the flowers are typically from, again, other paintings. This one, in particular, is from a Manet painting. This one over here is… these are the same flowers. So I'd like to repeat things over and over and over again and change them as I go. So these are also Manet flowers.

Basically, this happens throughout my work. I just take from art history. I just pick and choose paintings that I like, and parts of paintings that I like, and I repeat them over and over again and they become mine, which is a sort of a conceptual part of my painting to constantly make something… like very deliberately make it mine. I take possession of things. I think this is a very contemporary approach to our lives. So I'm sort of pointing at it.

So then this series with the hummingbirds is called “I Will Destroy You.” It's two hummingbirds fighting and it's over a number of flowers, again. So it's the same approach—I pick and choose a bunch of flowers and I put them on there on the linen. And so you have this is another Manet flower. This is Suzanne Valadon, this is Odilon Redon. You have Monet, and Redon again, and the hummingbirds come from the Internet. I was at my house upstate in New York. I was feeding hummingbirds, and they're incredibly bold, they're tiny, little animals, and they're really possessive, very territorial, and they fight. And they also, like for how small they’re, just very very very bold. And I was inspired by this energy. And then also, again, a really formal trope and paintings is the exploration of how you show movement. So this was a way for me to show movement, as well as bring figuration and abstraction together. So these are themes that go throughout, my work over and over and over again. The title “I Will Destroy You” is the title of a series of paintings with animals fighting. I thought that it was a nice way to kind of capture real violence without being completely insane.

Continuing with this painting, this is part of the series “Right and Not Accurate” which is, again, a series of my bodies in space. So there's Francis Bacon spaces, and also this is Edward Hopper. Edward Hopper is an iconic American painter, who is the high art as well as the general masses. And this was fascinating to me and that he is American, also, is something  that I'm very fascinated with. So I just took his spaces.  I started painting them during the pandemic because people were talking about his work a lot, because we were dealing with isolation and loneliness. And he portrays that in a lot of his paintings.So this one, specifically Morning Sun from 1952, it's his wife on a bed staring out a window, and it's compellingly about solitude, basically. And so during the pandemic, dealing with this, and so I just sort of started taking from that. And I multiplied my body on here to kind of play with the the idea of loneliness. 

This is the background of the painting. First I start and I put a wash on it. And then I made a drawing over it and then I painted in the final layer around. Here, and then I left this background so that you can see kind of how the painting is made. I'd like to always take, I don't want you to be totally absorbed by the painting. I always like to give you a way out of it. That's what that is. So this is a drawing in the background. 

And then we move on to this. This is the final one. I do make the paintings like this over and over again. I've made a number of them, but it's not specifically a series in that. They don't share the same title. This one is, I took images of Saint Sebastian, who was the patron saint of the bubonic plague. And again, it was like… it’s processing the pandemic. And so I was thinking about how people would turn to religion in pandemics of the past. And he was one of the icons.

So I put him in there, and again, it's like, you can see the different layers of painting very clearly so that it's sort of instructive, like there's a background that I paint on its linen, and it's primed. But then there's a background, and then there’s a drawing with the body. And then all of the flowers, and flowers are kind of layered, and just sort of taken out of their contexts and thrown on there.It reads as like a very internet based way of seeing things, or like just sort of removed from contexts, and splattered on there.

And again it's like very chronic painting So you have Courbet, Albert York and Gauguin and just et cetera. So it's taking these flowers. It's also playing with this idea that you learn to paint via painting, the old masters. You would just take someone else's painting and paint it, copy what they had made. And it's kind of pointing to that as well as the training of paintings.

So all of this together, when I put it all together and I was looking at it and thinking about it, I titled it “A Reality” because I wanted it to give you book ends for when you're in the show, but without defining specifically what those book ends are. So you end up a little bit confused. You're like on solid ground with the declaration of reality, but you don't really know what reality it is. And I thought that these paintings put that idea forward in a nice way. So a solid confusion.