When Klaus Münzenmaier hides away in his office for weeks, the Dachau artist Monika Siebmanns already knows what’s going on: her partner is already cooking up a new book. Sometimes it’s an erotic cookbook, sometimes a robber’s story for children, and Münzenmaier almost always gets artist friends on board, because his books are not only supposed to be material for the head, but always also for the eyes and the heart. Although Monika Siebmanns is used to a few surprises from her Klaus, she was amazed when he presented her with his latest work: an art volume of more than 400 pages, on which two dozen authors contributed. Friends, companions, fellow artists, including Klaus Herbrich, Norbert Kiening, Andreas Kreutzkam, Heiko Klohn and Karin Schuff, not to mention Heinz Eder, but also Elisabeth Boser and Jutta Mannes from the Dachau Galleries Association and Norbert Göttler, the district home attendant.
It is, as you might have guessed, a homage to Monika Siebmanns and her extensive oeuvre, and it is of course no coincidence that Klaus Münzenmaier gave it to her on her 75th birthday. Münzenmaier had previously published books that focused on individual aspects of Siebmanns’ art, such as the shadow as a special artistic momentum of her objects. This time he stretches the bow further. “Series?” is the brief and deliberately questionable title of this large-scale “comparative essay”.
“The same and the same is different with her”
There are plenty of series in art, and there is often “the danger of self-repetition, disguised as a variant,” the publisher notes critically. Anyone who knows Monika Siebmanns and her work knows that you really can’t blame her for this. “Like and like is different with her,” Klaus Münzenmaier sums it up succinctly. “Over the years, Monika Siebmanns has dealt with different, in many ways overlapping groups of topics that bear fruit one after the other. And she experiences each individual topic with technical brilliance, with the courage to take risks, with innovative techniques and combinatory ideas.” That’s phrased lovingly, but it’s also true: your works continue to develop in the artistic process, unfolding new facets, connecting again and again. This is anything but the series based on the old principle “The same thing again in green”.
The book is divided according to the topics mentioned above. In Siebmann’s work, these are balls, ball heads, helmets, heads, horns, the human being, archaic traces, departures, shadow games and – here it is more a question of a technique than a subject – the iron print further developed by Monika Siebmanns. Klaus Münzenmaier has preceded almost every topic group with a curated introduction that creates cross-references to art history. And there are many, since the well-travelled artist from Dachau draws the ideas for her formal and pictorial language not only from the European culture, but from almost all regions of the world and even from the gray antiquity of the Neolithic, when she has the rock carving of Valcamonica in her work integrated.
Klaus Münzenmaier also contributed many photographs of Monika Siebmann’s artworks, here a work from the “Helmets” theme group.
(Photo: Klaus Münzenmaier)
Wolfgang Feik recorded the artistic installation in front of a residential complex with a camera from different perspectives. In the interplay with the shadow, a surprising variety of details is revealed.
(Photo: Wolfgang Feik / Klaus Münzenmaier)
Heinz Eder approaches the artist’s work in a painterly and lyrical way.
You know each other and appreciate each other. Karin Schuff also worked on the book for Monika Siebmanns.
(Photo: Niels P. Joergensen)
How art and nature combine and complement each other becomes clear in this post-processed photograph.
(Photo: Klaus Münzenmaier)
This archaic, timeless and ubiquitous make her works accessible to the viewer for extensive interpretations; they invite you to personal observations and mental walks, and that is exactly what makes this volume so appealing: on the one hand, Siebmann’s works are presented in a large number of excellent photographs and, on the other hand, they can be viewed through the glasses of different viewers from different perspectives. Sometimes analyzing art history, sometimes chatting, sometimes poetic, sometimes staged photographically. The Dachau graphic artist Heiko Klohn even manages to bring all thematic groups together in the design of a super-sculpture and to a certain extent to throw a kind of Siebmann’s world formula onto paper.
Siebmanns replaced the water in the iron print with fire
The contributions of the artist friends are particularly enlightening – both in terms of Monika Siebmann’s work and in terms of her own work. When Heinz Eder contributes a colorful watercolor adaptation to a figurative sculpture, this sharpens the view of the painterly element in Siebmann’s black-framed object, and overlaps with other artists are also revealed. Gabriele Middelmann, who simulates cracked surfaces of solid materials with her cleverly painted works on paper, discovers more than just parallels to Monika Siebmann’s ceramic works. Rather, it is an “optical symbiosis and artistic fraternization of two completely different ways of working, based on the common spiritual roots of our understanding of art”.
This understanding of art is dynamic, serial work is a process, a creative experimental arrangement that progresses systematically and yet always leads to surprising results. The basic ingredients for Monika Siebmann’s work are the old cultural materials of mankind: clay and iron. It is therefore not surprising that she also tried her hand at ferroprinting, i.e. iron printing, during her printing experiments with Dieter Faustmann. Normally, the iron pressure plate is allowed to oxidize slightly by adding water; a corresponding rust impression is then obtained on the paper. Siebmanns uses fire instead of water. The heating creates a layer of scale that creates patterns on the paper that look like abstract paintings. Faustmann describes this experiment as “probably the first printing process with iron plates burned at over 1100 degrees”.
But isn’t that already a precursor to mass production?
Random reproduction has never interested Monika Siebmanns. Her print series also only have a small edition, here there is variation, be it through other colors or increased or reduced pressure in the press. Accordingly, the results are always exciting. “The long-time viewer never has the feeling that something will happen to him that he already suspects,” writes Klaus Münzenmaier. Monika Siebmanns probably feels the same way about her personal artistic biographer Klaus Münzenmaier.
The book was published in an edition of 50 copies. A copy is available for viewing at Monika Siebmann’s studio exhibition this weekend. The book can be purchased from Klaus Münzenmaier, order by email at [email protected]. The unit price is 50 euros.