Lea Lublin: Retrospective Kat. Lenbachhaus München

At the age of 12, Lea Lublin (*1929 in Poland, †1999 in Paris) joined at the Academy of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires; in 1968 she exhibited herself for three weeks alongside her 8 months old son in a Parisian museum; two years later one of her paintings was confiscated in Argentina and Lublin was charged with three months of probation for public indecency. In her exhibition »The Striptease of the Jesus Child« at Yvon Lambert's Paris-based gallery, Lublin inquired into the underlying eroticism in Christian painting. On the trail of Marcel Duchamp in Buenos Aires, Lublin purloined the French artist's former letterbox as a piece of evidence for her theory of the ready-made. These are but some of the fascinating moments within the life and art of this Argentine-French artist whose work is still largely ­unknown to a broader international audience. Lublin's rigorous examination of the image as an ideological ­construct and her postulate for a more active role of the viewer continues to be of acute relevance until today. The expansive catalogue which accompanies the exhibition encompasses information on Lublin's entire career and production in all mediums spanning a period of more than three decades. Several essential chapters on the artist’s trajectory, such as the abandonment of painting in favour of environments and actions, the use of dialogue as an art form, the deconstruction of art historical imagery, and the inquiry into Marcel Duchamp’s sojourn in Buenos Aires, find particular attention in the publication.

Exhibition:
Kunstbau Lenbachhaus München, 25/6–13/9/2015

Lea Lublin (1929–1999), was a child of Jewish emigrants. At age 12, she joined, as a Wunderkind, the Academy of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, where, in 1949, she took her degree. In 1968, she was in Paris and was  invited to the exhibition, 24th Salon de Mai at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. Instead of doing paintings as the most of her colleagues, she exhibited the bed of her 8 months old son, and lived, during the opening hours of the show, with him under a wall-decoration made of perspex with childish motifs. Back in Argentina, Lea Lublin worked on site-specific pieces and again left South-America for living in Paris, because of the political situation on the continent. She was organizing feminist art groups as well as panels to discuss sexual stereotyping and its negotiation with activists, sociologists and philosophers.