What the works on display have in common is that they manage with little. They are part of the long tradition of European Minimalism, which had its beginnings in ancient Laconia, where the Spartans prided themselves on saying anything important in just a few words – in contrast to the flowery manner of speaking their oriental neighbors preferred. Hence the expression 'laconic'.
One associates little with poverty, as well as with thriftiness – as a conscious economic stance emancipated from deficiency, which in the field of art and culture becomes an aesthetic strategy related to asceticism. The aim behind this approach is to achieve the best with the least means. The lowest possible consumption of space, time, material, energy and labor, thriftiness characterizes the early bourgeois perspective on production, in contrast to feudalistic waste. Its purpose was the magnificent presentation of wealth as social strength.
To this day the strategy of emotional overpowering based on abundance so typical of Baroque is recognizable in the extensive spatial installations of many artists. Only when the excessive spread of capitalist accumulation and the consumerism that goes with it, personalized by a voracity for more and more, has penetrated all areas of life, can a limitation to just a little become an alternative. And indeed even have a subversive impact – as – self-assertive – abstinence.
Burkhard Brunn

Kirstin Arndt - Charlotte Posenenske - Michael Reiter - Martina Wolf -
Curator Burkhard Brunn -

The first exhibition at the MMK 2 – "Boom She Boom: Works from the MMK Collection" is devoted to women artists in the MMK collection. Among Germany’s contemporary art museums, the MMK is unique in that, from its founding in 1991 to the present, it has directed special attention to the strong contributions of women artists of the past decades.
A survey of the purchases made over the past years strikingly mirrors the fact that women artists account for a very large number of the MMK collection’s recent acquisitions. Major works by Vanessa Beecroft, Rineke Dijkstra, Teresa Margolles, Sarah Morris, Taryn Simon and others mark significant expansions of the collection, which more recently has been enhanced with workgroups by women presently in the limelight of the international art world, for example Andrea Büttner, Jewyo Rhij, Dayanita Singh and Dolores Zinny. From the beginning, the MMK has also devoted itself to the Frankfurt art scene, and here as well the museum’s holdings are enriched by such individualist and radical perspectives as that of Anne Imhof, Franziska Kneidl and Adrian Williams.
The exhibition title “Boom She Boom” quotes the sensationally successful doo-wop song of 1954 by the Chords, which has undergone many reinterpretations since that time.

Jo Baer - Vanessa Beecroft - Shannon Bool - Andrea Büttner - Vija Celmins - Hanne Darboven - Rineke Dijkstra - Marlène Dumas - Parastou Forouhar - Katharina Fritsch - Isa Genzken - Tamara Grčić - Bethan Huws - Anne Imhof - Barbara Klemm - Eva Kotátková - Franziska Kneidl - Teresa Margolles - Sarah Morris - Cady Noland - Anja Niedringhaus - Christa Näher - Charlotte Posenenske - Jewyo Rhii - Taryn Simon - [Elaine Frances Sturtevant] Sturtevant - Rosemarie Trockel - Adrian Williams -
Curator Susanne Gaensheimer - Peter Gorschlüter -