Sprüth Magers (art gallery)

Sprüth Magers is a commercial art gallery owned by Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, with spaces in London, Berlin, and Los Angeles, representing artists including Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Andreas Gursky, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and Rosemarie Trockel. The gallery was founded in 1998 through the merging of their individual galleries.

In February 1983, Monika Sprüth opened her first gallery in Cologne. Advocating the talents of then-emerging artists Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and Rosemarie Trockel, Sprüth countered a "Cologne over-run by male artists" with a gallery focused on women (Herbert, p. 32). Divorced from the écriture feminine of 1970s French feminism as well as what is generally described as a more 'militant' American critique, the perspective advanced by Sprüth sought to acknowledge the significance of sexual politics while seeing these artists as artists first, not 'women artists' condemned to endlessly labor beneath the category of gender.

Emblematic of this perspective is Sprüth's publishing venture Eau de Cologne: an "effervescent, shape-shifting magazine, featuring almost exclusively women artists and art practitioners – which she published, with accompanying exhibitions, three times between 1985 and 1993" (Herbert, p. 32). Combining theoretical discourse with visual practice, Eau de Cologne "gave artists such as Trockel, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler and Jutta Koether a European venue to pursue their own self-making and critical empowerment" (Anastas, p. 20). While the final 1989 edition was co-edited by art historian Karen Marta and Cologne-based artist Jutta Koether, the first two editions in 1985 and 1987 were edited solely by Sprüth and featured early work by Sherman and Kruger as cover art. The Sherman photograph is taken from what is often called her 'disasters' series – an abused and mutilated grotesque – while Kruger's work is a close-up shot of a woman's sharply-taloned hands holding her face in a universal expression of grief. Bannered across the bottom of Kruger's image is the phrase ‘Are we having fun yet?’ The critic Johanna Burton observed: "We are given female portraits (basic advertising wisdom tells us that the best way to sell a magazine is to put a girl on the cover) and yet granted none of the reflexive visual gratification usually attached to the genre" (Burton, p. 195). By adhering to conventional expectations on the one hand while defiantly severing these figures from a clichéd iconography of feminine allure on the other, Sprüth’s editorial decisions sought to render gender stereotypes explicit.

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