Jeanette Mundt

Overduin & Co. is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Jeanette Mundt titled, Human Remains.

A recurring motif throughout this group of new paintings is a figure with hands pressed against her abdomen. The artist has used her own body to enact this pose and although the works are technically self-portraiture, that is not what defines the paintings. Mundt explains, a body was needed to paint this pose, and why not her own. The motif of pulling the torso apart points towards a general societal shift of turning inward over the past two years, as the world has moved through the pandemic. Mundt also drew on the flattened space of medieval tapestries, which have served as a reference for many past works, to compose the background for some of the figures.

The exhibition also features a series of paintings depicting the artist in the pose of a figure from a Henri Toulouse-Lautrec painting. References to this Lautrec figure have appeared in Mundt’s work over the years in a series titled, “Climbing,” and these paintings are an extension of this series. The space the figure occupies in these new works is taken from Edward Hopper’s, “Room By the Sea” (1951).

In another of Mundt’s paintings, a scene from the film Midsommar is rendered with the artist painted in the place of the film’s main character who is pictured after winning the Maypole dance, adorned with a mass of flowers. Mundt based the flowers in this piece on works by a multitude of artists from Van Gogh and Courbet, to Albert York, Odilon Redon, Amelie von Wulffen, and so on.

In addition to the paintings featuring the artist herself standing in for an array of figures, there are two large paintings picturing the eyes of the artist’s father. The scans Mundt based these paintings on reveal scars on the eyes.

Mundt’s work addresses ongoing dialogues on ideas of power and the gaze; ownership and the positioning of the self within the work. Mundt’s look at self-reflexivity invokes a culture that puts the individual at the center of everything, on a pedestal, thinking of themselves first and foremost, and taking possession of everything they want.

Jeanette Mundt (b. 1982, USA) lives and works in New York, NY. Mundt completed her graduate degree at Rutgers University in New Jersey and her undergraduate degree at Pratt Institute in New York. Solo exhibitions of Mundt’s work have been organized by Company Gallery, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Bridget Donahue, and Off Vendome in New York; Société in Berlin; and the Green Gallery in Milwaukee. Mundt’s work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and has been included in group exhibitions organized by the New Museum in New York; G2 Kunsthalle in Leipzig, Germany; as well as “Painting: Now and Forever, Part III,” organized by Greene Naftali and Matthew Marks Gallery in New York; and “The Vitalist Economy of Painting,” curated by Isabelle Graw at Galerie Neu in Berlin.