Maria Legat

Maria Legat has named her first retrospective Missionary Position, and the title also sets the tone for its content. We all assume we know what the term means, yet the artist draws on its linguistic formulation to explore its far-reaching social implications. The missionary position reflects traditional gender roles and implies a particular positioning of women: subordinate, selfless and passive. As an artist, mother and citizen, she seeks an opposing position, one characterised by respect, equality and empathy.

The Missionary Position represents a Eurocentric and androcentric perspective. Once again, white men have positioned themselves to enforce long-established forms of dominance through economic, military and cultural power. Yet the “missionary” aspect of the Missionary Position functions not only as a metonym for the oppression of women and a new form of imperialism. We all “proselytise” in one way or another. For Legat, it is about becoming aware of one’s own position and seeking an alternative, a stance of dialogue.

In her exhibition, Legat takes stock of her position: her works, on the one hand, take a stand and, on the other, invite exchange. The working method she has developed is particularly suited to this purpose. As a painter, she draws with charcoal on raw linen, which is not stretched over a frame but pinned flat to the wall, and then, in a second step, develops her forms using translucent layers of paint she has mixed herself. She practises a transparent form of painting that does not conceal its construction but openly reveals the process of its making. Her paintings thus resist immediate comprehension and, with it, the viewing habits of our over-contrasted world. It takes time and patience to trace her depictions and recognise the connections between the motifs. This refusal to conform to contemporary conventions of seeing can certainly be understood as a gesture of resistance.

Legat’s paintings are always political, yet they are not responses to current political events; they are theoretically grounded, yet they are not illustrations of the ideas of fashionable figurehead theorists; they are personal, yet they are not expressions of individual mythologies. Legat draws and paints parables about the state of the world. In a lengthy process of doubt, deliberation and decision-making, she wrestles with every painterly gesture in order to arrive at her own original and powerful pictorial inventions.