(Dortmund 1953–1997 Vienna)
Mary Wigman, 1987, mirror object with printed quotes in various colours, painted plywood, 189 x 52 x 50 cm, (PP)

Provenance:
Private Collection, Graz
Dorotheum, 25 May 2004, lot 102
European Private Collection

Exhibition:
Graz, Galerie Bleich-Rossi, Die Reise nach Jerusalem (Journey to Jerusalem), 1987, catalogue reproduction no. 11

Mary Wigman was made in connection with the exhibition, “Die Reise nach Jerusalem” [“The Journey to Jerusalem”], a complex of work made up of 16 individual objects which make reference to Judaism. This exhibition was shown in 1987 at the Galerie Bleich-Rossi. The title and the typographical quotations running in opposition directions over the object give the work an impact beyond the expressiveness of the object itself. Both forms of expression, objects and words have equal weight, however. With reference to Mary Wigman: German dancer, choreographer and dance teacher. “This woman possessed by dance was actually called Karoline Sofie Marie Wiegmann and was born in Hanover in 1886. Her parents lived at Schmiedestraße 33, and had a sewing machine and bicycle shop there. ... The train station not far from there with its arriving and departing trains, awoke in Marie Wiegmann -who even as a child was called Mary – an early desire to travel and for adventure (Wiegel). In the autumn of 1919 Mary Wigman was feted in Hamburg as a great new dancer for the first time by a German audience. She was almost 33 and in the years following she would manage to establish herself internationally as a creator and facilitator of the independent art of Expressionist Dance. (...) The unbending stamina, which she exhibited in her artistic experimentation and creativity, present a not easily comprehensible contradiction to her stance towards the Nazi regime. (...) Through her relationship with Hanns Benkert, who would later be one of the leading armaments manufacturers of the Nazi economy, she was protected and influenced. After 1941, however, after Benkert left her, she suffered repression as a performer of “degenerate art” (...). She lost her dance school in Dresden, her work was curtailed and obstructed. (...) In 1949 she moved to West Berlin, and died there in 1973.