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Munich · Art

The second female director of the Kunstverein Munich—one of Germany’s oldest art institutions—reflects on her diverse career, the importance of paying fair wages, and ensuring art institutions don’t reproduce the systems they are criticising in their exhibitions.

Unlike many of her contemporaries in the art world, curator Maurin Dietrich spent little time in galleries and museums as a child. She attributes this to her non-academic background. “Art institutions are historically intertwined with the bourgeoisie and that still bears traces today. At least in the German context, it is an urgent task to become more inclusive, not only in terms of race and sexuality, but in terms of class identities as well.”

In contrast, Dietrich’s introduction to the visual art world was by way of reading, writing, and storytelling. Spending hours in her local library from a young age, Dietrich went on to study comparative literature and art history at The Free University of Berlin. “The ways we tell stories about the world to each other and to ourselves, and how these serve as an identity construct, have been a recurring interest for me. Most of the artists I find myself interested in come from writing and have moved to visual art practices a lot later in their lives,” she explains, citing US-American writer and photocopy artist Patti Hill and New York-based artist and poet Diamond Stingily as examples with which she both worked.

While studying, Dietrich was surrounded by books both in and out of university: she spent most of her free time working part-time jobs, taking coats at the Berlin State Opera, doing night shifts at the academy of arts and eventually working at publishing house and art bookshop Walther König’s main Berlin store. “It was an essential part of my education. I often had hours during which no one would come by. I would take the time to read and look at expensive publications,” she says. “I also just needed to make money. From the beginning of my degree I wasn’t sure if I had the resources to actually make it in the art field.”

About

Born in
Halle (Salle), Germany

Based in
Berlin Germany

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Overview

A graduate of Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Christian August has been active on the urban art scene in Germany since the 1990s. Under the alias Kid Cash, August began his artistic career as a graffiti artist. In 1998, he co-founded Klub7, an artist collective based in Berlin and Halle. The group creates large-scale murals and site-specific performances in public spaces throughout Germany and internationally.

August produces gestural abstract paintings, predominantly in shades of grey, black and white, combined with oranges, blues, greens and pinks. His works focus on urbanity and architecture and pay particular attention to the surface of the canvas, alternating between soft, rough and smooth textures. In paintings such as Flesh and Stone 03 (2020), subtle undulating lines interrupt a wash of colour. A bright orange edge applied with spray paint frames a central black-and-white composition in DIRTY WATER (2021). In 2019, August presented his large-format paintings alongside works by Klub7 artists Ingo Albrecht-Hauser and Mike Okay in “Coming Off the Wall” at the Kunststiftung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt in Berlin.