Jeanette Mundt. Obsession

About

For Jeanette Mundt, drawing is a form of visual thinking—an innate impulse that enables her to process ideas and make relations between them. Drawing is a form of discovery. A means of tapping the connections between things, of testing limits, of opening oneself to chance. Neither a fixed endpoint nor a predefined goal, this liminal and unfixed creative space is a zone of continual anticipation, “a way of being exposed to what comes.” The fleeting, meditative quality of drawing as a practice is reflected in how the works in Obsession were created “on the move,” often serving as a creative anchor and visual diary during moments of reflection and travel while away from the studio.

Jeanette Mundt’s dynamic, formally omnivorous practice freely taps a variety of input, ranging from popular film and television to personal photographs and the history of painting. These different references don’t coalesce in the manner of a frictionless pastiche, but are repeated and reworked in streams of images. Each work is created in reference to a previous work coming before it, whether painted on canvas or drawn on paper. However, the relation between painting and drawing doesn’t follow the traditional logic of the sketch versus finished work. Instead, Mundt’s images emerge according to what the writer Elise Duryee-Browner calls a “biosemiotic evolution.” Each work spawns from a previous one, creating chains of images that mutuate and multiply. As Duryee-Browner writes, “Each individual painting carries, pregnant, other works within it.”