Birgit Megerle

Birgit Megerle’s exhibition “Soft Power” contained some memorable works, but one in particular has stayed with me. Kid Woolf, 2018, is one of several paintings by Megerle based on the covers of the magazine Emma; it shows Nicole Kidman in the role of Virginia Woolf in the 2002 film The Hours. Here, the literary icon has become precisely that: an icon, an image, an actor’s impersonation gracing the cover of one of Germany’s oldest and most widely circulated feminist magazines. Megerle’s show demonstrated that the iconic is not necessarily the superficial, and that becoming an icon is not necessarily

print May 2017

Vera Molnar

“My computer-aided procedure is simply a systematization of [an artist’s] traditional approach,” Vera Molnar wrote about her algorithm-based pen-plotter drawings in 1975. In 1960, the Hungarian-born, Paris-based artist cofounded the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) with Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, and others; their idea was to rethink the relation between object and beholder by means of kinetic-aesthetic experiments. Molnar was given access to a computer at the Bull Information Systems research center in Paris in 1968, and the new technology seemed to be the key to solving a