Nadine Schemmann / Mother Fields

Sep 26 – Nov 15, 2025

Nadine Schemmann transforms the Sommer Salon kitchen through painting and sculpture, creating an immersive environment where a suspended linen work becomes both barrier and invitation. The work, like improvised saloon doors, dissolves boundaries while inviting passage into the contradictory terrain.

 

Traditionally a symbol of care and nourishment, the kitchen here becomes a site to explore the dualities of maternal experience. In Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Martha Rosler parodied the cooking show format to reveal how kitchen utensils function as signs carrying social meaning. Rosler unsettled the assumed link between womanhood and domestic labor. In Mother Fields, Schemmann extends this critique: nothing is concealed. Seams and folds are left visible, fronts and backs on display, exposing the structures of maternal labor.

 

Motherhood emerges as a socially constructed field of opposites – nurturing and burden, visibility and erasure, resilience and vulnerability. The exposed stitching evokes the fragmented experience of motherhood, pieced together through care.

 

Alongside the installation, Schemmann presents color paintings created through bleaching, drying, and suspending pigments, bringing in a layer of intuition and feeling through color.