Vernissage 21.09.2025 | 14:00
21.09.2025 - 01.11.2025

RUNE MIELDS | Göttinnen Solo Exhibition

On the occasion of her 90th birthday, Galerie Judith Andreae will open the exhibition Rune Mields: GODDESSES on 21 September. Following solo exhibitions in 2015 and 2019, this marks the artist’s third solo presentation in Bonn. Rune Mields has long established a reputation that extends far beyond the Rhineland art scene. Her oeuvre resists temporal classification, asserting instead an autonomous and unmistakable presence. Her biography reflects both the singular and the exemplary trajectory of women artists who, in a male-dominated art world, were compelled to fight for the right to become visual artists and to be recognized as such.

With her engagement with the Black Goddesses, Mields turns to a theme at once archaic and radically contemporary. Over the course of several years of research, she assembled myths and traditions of female deities who, across cultures worldwide, embody the dark, ominous, yet also generative dimensions of femininity: from early Mesopotamian records inscribed in cuneiform more than two millennia ago, to the Haitian goddess Erzulie, a Voodoo divinity of love, discord, and vengeance, who is said to have fought in the Haitian Revolution of the eighteenth century.

The result is a monumental cycle comprising nearly 200 drawings and a seven-part polyptych (1995), forming a universal compendium of female archetypes. Mields translates inherited imagery and textual sources into a precise and highly distinctive visual language. Her gallery of sinister goddesses constitutes an antithesis to idyllic conceptions of the life-giving mother. These goddesses are dark and ambivalent beings: fertile and fearsome, cruel and warlike. Concave and convexly contoured breasts, as well as the vaginas of the deities—often rendered in triangular form—articulate the origin of the eternal cycle of birth, death, creation, and chaos.

Against the backdrop of a present in which female-coded bodies and gender roles remain overlaid by stereotypes, Mields’s geographically ordered archive deconstructs both romanticized fantasies of matriarchy and patriarchal promises of salvation. At the same time, it invites a reconsideration of femininity—contradictory, unrelenting, and generative all at once.

This cycle of dark goddesses reveals female powers long buried or forgotten, which do not appear conciliatory or harmonious, but implacable and defiant. Their dark aspects are inscribed in their very epithets (such as “the Terrible,” “the Cruel,” or “Goddess of Darkness”), in martial or murderous attributes such as sword, spear, and skull, and in accentuated features such as bared teeth and protruding tongues. Some goddesses assume animal form or appear alongside animals—for instance, the Irish war goddess Morrígan (raven/crow) or the soul-devouring Le-Hev-Hev of Melanesia/Oceania, who takes the shape of a spider or crab.

For more than fifty years, Rune Mields (*1935, Münster) has pursued, as an independent artist, a multidiscursive and multiperspectival exploration of the world—its creation myths, cultural systems of order, its structures and its beauty. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including documenta 6 and, most recently, in 2025 at the Ludwig Forum Aachen. Early formative presentations took place at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Bonner Kunstverein, and the Frauenmuseum Bonn.