An art student in Munich

2025

Textile works, performance, and installations with objects and drawings

Salta Art, Munich
21 Mar, 2025 – 18 May, 2025

By revisiting the book An Art Student in Munich, Mercedes Azpilicueta connects the protofeminist perspective of Anna Mary Howitt, who navigated the male-dominated art world of the 19th century, with contemporary themes of diversity, equity and inclusion, amplifying the historically marginalized contributions of women. Her analysis shows how artists like Howitt challenged conventions, highlighting a legacy of voices in the artistic discourse long before their formal recognition.

Through textile works, performance, and installations with objects and drawings, Azpilicueta rethinks art history, giving poetic voice to overlooked narratives and reexamining the legacies of women in art. Aware of the gender inequalities and hierarchies that restricted women’s access to academies, training spaces, and exhibitions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Azpilicueta recovers female figures who, despite the limitations they faced, made significant contributions to culture.

For the exhibition, Azpilicueta focuses on the years British artist Anna Mary Howitt spent in Munich, where she arrived in 1850. Associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the daughter of a suffragist mother, Howitt published articles about her life in Germany, which were compiled in the book An Art Student in Munich (1853). Denied the opportunity to develop a career as a painter alongside her male colleagues, Howitt turned to spiritualism, becoming a medium and using drawing to communicate with the beyond. Her mystical drawings are expressions of abstract art, created long before Kandinsky, Mondrian, and other avant-garde artists who abandoned figuration. Howitt’s forms do not correspond to empirical experience, and it is precisely this detachment from the visible world that makes her drawings approach the spiritual and the mysterious.

The exhibition features a large-scale installation that includes sculptures, drawings, and carpets inspired by Anna Mary Howitt’s experiences in 19th-century Munich. Three modular sculptures, crafted from second-hand easels, period furniture, leather, and repurposed materials, reference the shared studio space Howitt described in her book. These sculptures, designed in collaboration with Katharina Kasinger, are transformable, emphasizing fluidity, hybridity, and the merging of subjectivities. Azpilicueta’s drawings, integrated into carpets, provide a poetic reimagining of Howitt’s journey, bridging historical narratives with contemporary feminist perspectives. The installation as a whole invites reflection on women’s artistic contributions and the resilience of overlooked histories.

Text adapted from Salta Art. 

Artist talk with curator Florencia Malbrán.

Exhibition text by Florencia Malbrán. 

Exhibition Credits:

Production in collaboration with Katharina Kasinger

Exhibition design in collaboration with Vanina Scolavino

Presented in collaboration with Instituto Cervantes Munich. 

Supported by Mondriaan Fonds.