Valentine
Monica Ross/HALLE 14 – Zentrum für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the British artist and author Monica Ross visited the Dresden Picture Gallery, where she was captivated by the sight of Raphael's "Sistine Madonna". She then began researching the reception of the painting. Valentine is an exploration of the Madonna "as a sequence of overlapping moments in which temporalities interweave and recur" (Lisa Panting). In her book, Ross combines personal memories with an art-historical analysis of the image, which leads her to other traces, including the case of Freud's Dora, which she presents as a feminist critique, to the re-reading of Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility" and the Balkan wars in the 1990s. The English original was created in 2000 in collaboration with the London gallery MILCH and the graphic designer Markus Dreßen. The book is now available in German translation for the first time.

Monica Ross (1950 - 2013) was a British artist and art lecturer who worked with video, drawing, installation, text and performance. Her works deal with questions of representation, memory and history.