Ruth Marten: All about Eve – Villa Zanders, Germany

“The Jazz Era! Cinema! Sex! Josephine Baker! Surrealism! Dangerous ideas! Through it all, my heart skips a beat when I… I paint on these prints and I feel for these women incredibly related. We are one body and one soul.” 

– Ruth Marten, 2024

Ruth Marten, *1949, lives and works in New York City, NY/USA). The exhibition shows her latest series, All About Eve, which the American artist has been working on since 2022. The series reveals a complex structure that blurs between high and low art, crosses boundaries of reality and genre, and is full of humor. Art historical references mix with our own image inventions, which enter into a deep symbiosis with the original image motif. One hundred years after the nude series of dancers from the Paris variety theater Les Folies Bergère was created, Ruth Marten looks at the dancers from today’s perspective – captured by the British-Polish photographer Stanisław Julian Ignacy Ostroróg (1863–1929).

In 2003, Ruth Marten discovered her passion for working with old prints and photographs as the basis for her own artistic cosmos. Through revisions in the form of drawings and collages, the artist creates a connection between historical representations and contemporary perspectives. Thematically, her works revolve around identity, nature and the animal world in relation to the human counterpart, fashion, dreams, sexuality, and society’s view of the role and appearance of women over the years. The allusion to the biblical Eve in All About Eve creates a connection between the dancers depicted and archetypal ideas of femininity. Ruth Marten removes “her” dancers from the male gaze and transfers each one into their own existence.

In addition to the works from the All About Eve series, the exhibition provides an overview of the artist’s work to date with around 30 other works from 2008 to 2022.

The exhibition is curated by Dr. Ina Dinter.