Ståndare och pistiller (Stamens and pistils)

Martina Müntzing’s production bears witness to her interest in (and extensive knowledge of) art history. This knowledge enables her to work in dialogue with famous predecessors in the field of painting. Quite a few of her most admired works consequently, to some extent, interact with earlier masterpieces from centuries gone by. Her famous double portrait (immortalizing Martina and her husband) Ambassadörerna, efter Hans Holbein / The Ambassadors, after Hans Holbein (1998, oil on canvas, 205 x 209 cm, Helsingborg Museum of Art / Dunker’s Cultural Center, Helsingborg, Sweden) and, the monumental genre composition, I morgon är en annan dag / Tomorrow is Another Day (2016 – 2018, oil on canvas, 165 x 300 cm, private collection) hints at inspiration from legendary artists such as Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497 – 1543), Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684 – 1721) and Lucian Freud (1922 – 2011). Swedish greats too, like Richard Bergh (1858 – 1919), have been successfully paraphrased in works like (Farväl till en utsikt / A Farewell to a View, 2019, oil on canvas, 206 x 271.5 cm, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg, Sweden).

Ståndare och pistiller (Stamens and pistils) is an amalgamation of two different artistic paths explored by Müntzing around the turn of the Millennium. More specifically the composition combines Müntzing’s love of 17th century floral still lifes with her investigation of the technical possibilities offered by op art (a style of visual art where artworks are abstract, with many of the better-known pieces [like paintings by Bridget Riley, born 1931] created in black and white. Typically, they give the viewer the impression of movement, hidden images, flashing/vibrating patterns or swelling/warping).

Müntzing spent a few years in Amsterdam in the late 1990s. It was here that she painted one of her most famous pictures, Ambassadörerna, efter Hans Holbein / The Ambassadors after Hans Holbein, and it was here that she spent countless hours, if not days, admiring paintings in the vast, and distinguished, collections of the prestigious Rijksmuseum. Her visits to the museum are, briefly, mentioned in the book I morgon är en annan dag (co-written by Fredrik Sjöberg and Martina Müntzing), 2019:

Holland as well as England have a lot to offer, especially for those who love art museums [...] and soon Martina was a regular guest at the Rijksmuseum, where she became somewhat of a celebrity among the security staff, partly because she rarely wanted to go home when the place closed in the evenings, partly because she was often so intimately curious about the teeming Dutch Old Master still lifes that the security alarm went off occasionally.

Müntzing’s myopic studies, of the above-referenced still lifes, made for a good, and solid, starting point in her own production during these years, resulting in breathtaking compositions like Leda (1997, oil and acrylic on canvas, 150 x 150 cm, whereabouts unknown). The painting, depicting a magnificent and detailed flower arrangement in a vase, covers the entire canvas and, almost, cries out for attention because of its intense palette. If one were to exchange the visually potent background of lilac (for a more traditionally somber black), however, one could easily make comparisons with the celebrated 17th century still lifes of Old Masters like Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568 – 1625), Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573 – 1621) and Jan Davidsz. de Heem (1606 – 1684), whose works hang in the Rijksmuseum. Fredrik Sjöberg writes (in I morgon är en annan dag, 2019): “Martina’s own paintings from this period are a story in themselves. For example, she whipped out a whole series of kitschy flamboyant flower still lifes and vanitas motifs in colors that can be said to be unabashed: fireworks in pink, Klein blue, bright red.”

Still lifes, including vanitas or memento mori themes (still life imagery of transitory items, in Müntzing’s case often including skulls as in Vin och vatten / Wine and Water, 2002, oil on panel, 25 x 25 cm, private collection), remained in Müntzing’s repertoire in the years following her move from Amsterdam. Two examples are to be found in, the more conventional flower still life, Rom och Cola / Rum and Coke (oil on canvas, 71 x 51 cm, private collection) and, the vanitas themed, Super Miss (oil on canvas, 110 x 110 cm, private collection), both from 2001. The latter is especially interesting since the central motif of a skull is depicted against a, circular black and white, op art background. The op art technique relates the painting to works like London (2001, oil on canvas, 75 x 140 cm, Public Art Agency Sweden / Swedish Embassy, Paris), executed while Müntzing resided in an Iaspis studio in the capital of the United Kingdom. Sjöberg, again, writes:

Later in London, where the young artist […] lived for a couple of years thanks to a studio grant from Iaspis, Martina did a lot of work with op art, that is, abstract, graphically pure painting that can put the viewer in a state reminiscent of chemically acquired dizziness. [...] Those pictures were, she says now, if nothing else very restful to work with. Straight lines and clean color fields. In addition, I am told, op art, or rather elements of op art, was a way for her to move forward in painting.

Whether Ståndare och pistiller (Stamens and pistils) was executed in London or not, it certainly relates to Müntzing’s other work from the period. The composition, a minor painterly tour de force in itself, is based on Müntzing’s exploration of op art, where most of the piece (including the flower arrangement itself, as well as the vase and background) is predominantly rendered in black and white. In what appears to have been a moment of joyful inspiration and playful exploration, however, Müntzing puts her palette to good use, realistically depicting minor individual details in the shape of the stamens and pistils. These colourful areas counterbalance the, initial, overall op art effect of the composition, creating a sort of spatial forcefield that surrounds the composition. The mesmerized, but bewildered, viewers thus find themselves on the threshold of different realities where concepts like positive and negative have ceased to exist. Rather like Alice (in Lewis Carroll’s celebrated novel Alice Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There from 1872), who climbs through a mirror into a secret world behind it, the viewer enters a fantastical place where, just like a reflection, everything is reversed.