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The New York–based artist Jeanette Mundt is probably best known for her broadly colored figurative work that appropriates images of female bodies from art history and popular culture to negotiate interrelated concepts of gender, sexuality, and nationalism – for instance in her paintings of the US women’s Olympic gymnastics team, shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. For TEXTE ZUR KUNST, Mundt reproduced an image from a series that was recently exhibited at Art Basel | Unlimited. Facing two undressed women while considering the work’s title, “Good for Me,” one immediately wonders what exactly might be benevolent here, since one figure appears to grasp her abdomen and another is lying on her back with her limbs stretched out as if fighting off an invisible attacker. Here, Mundt puts a (quite literal) spin on the crouching female bodies that appear throughout her “Climbing” series from 2019, which itself appropriates the nude figure in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Crouching Woman with Red Hair” (1897), suggesting that she is about to engage in a sexual act. But in “Good for Me,” the mattress under the supine nude seems to pile up to take the form of a hillscape, which evokes the recurring mountain ranges in many of Mundt’s other work and, in this case, might constitute a commentary on the sexist art historical trope of equating the naked female body with untouched nature waiting to be conquered – or “climbed,” if you will. Besides this signed edition, TEXTE ZUR KUNST offers ten additional, unique variations of it that feature hand-drawn flowers, which Mundt based on works by artists ranging from Van Gogh and Courbet to Odilon Redon and Amelie von Wulffen.
