It's more than a pretty anecdote.

Even if it's a nice story.

And you actually have to look back a long time to find a comparable constellation in all the art stories that Frankfurt families have written.

Two or more generations of painters, that was the last time with Wilhelm Steinhausen, whose daughter Marie was neither able to attend an academy nor was she allowed to paint whatever she wanted.

“Stick to your quiet flowers,” the father said to his daughter: “People don't show their best behavior when you paint them.”

Christoph Schütte

Freelance author in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Or in the 18th century with Johann Ludwig Ernst Morgenstern's dynasty of landscape and vedute painters.

Or, a few years earlier, with Christian Georg and Johann Georg Schütz.

Women, of course, as they can now be discovered in the show in the Frankfurt exhibition hall 1A, which is equally prosaic and striking, entitled “Three - Jewish Women Painter from Frankfurt”, were not there with the exception of Marie Steinhausen.

And not Jewish women anyway.

Even if that is of secondary importance for Julia Ovrutschski.

“It is important that we are three artists,” says the painter, born in Saint Petersburg in 1961, who came to Frankfurt in 1995 with her mother Tatjana and her then seven-year-old daughter Anna Nero as so-called contingent refugees.

More than three good reasons

Indeed, that is what matters.

Mind you, there are more than just three good reasons for this exhibition, which was set up as part of the festival year “1700 Years of Jewish Life in Germany” and realized with the support of the Zonta Club.

And definitely more than three reasons, be it derived from origin, gender or Frankfurt homeland, to have a look at them.

Ultimately, in addition to the youngest, meanwhile grown-up artist in the family, Anna Nero, who has become internationally known at the latest with “Jetzt!”, The major exhibition of young painting in Hamburg, Bonn, Wiesbaden and Chemnitz, has two previously largely unknown positions in Frankfurt discover.

Find your own place first

The grandmother Tatjana Ovrutschski, who was trained in a classically realistic manner in Moscow and died shortly before the opening of the show at the age of 86, was a successful artist in Russia. A painter whose figurative, always narrative-motivated work tries to tie in with the new objective pictures of Otto Dix and whose stage-like staging shows some connections to the painting of the first and second generation of the Leipzig School. Alone, “it's difficult when you come from outside,” remembers Ovrutschski, who, in addition to her painterly work, has been successful with her own painting school for more than 20 years.

Because in fact it also had to find its place in the art and exhibition industry in the West. By then, she had long since developed her own themes and her own style, which was much less narrative than her mother, and which was guided more by formal questions. With a painting in a preferably modest format that suggests the interior, still life or landscape. But basically her pictures are inspired by reality, but largely abstract.

And yet the highly individual painting of grandmother, granddaughter and daughter has more in common than it seems at first glance. This applies not only to the preference for broken or, as Anna Nero says, “artificial colors” observed here and there, but also for the meaning of space. And sometimes more (with Julia), sometimes less (with her mother) and with Nero completely abstract forms and motifs, which in their compositions seem to develop a strange life of their own that is increasingly emancipating from the viewer as well as from the painter.

Above all, however, all three artists stand self-confidently in their time, whether they tell stories from the household, the arena, a bar or the vaudeville, which is overwhelming even for the emancipated women of the Soviet Union. Or whether they generate largely abstract spaces from nothing but color, lines and surfaces. Or, like Nero, arrange abstract figures in front of a grid, the reality of which is obviously a digital one.

“The outside world”, says the artist, who trained in Mainz and Leipzig, “is not so relevant to me”. Which is at best half the story. It is true that shapes like those from a 3D printer can be found everywhere in her pictures. And yet there are motifs that, like the formal vocabulary of mother and grandmother, always refer back to a form of reality in the end. The silent flowers of earlier centuries alone are definitely not enough for them all. “My grandmother's main concern is women,” Anna Nero sums it up: “For me, it's always about sex.” About asserting yourself. As a woman and as an artist. And, as with all women in this remarkable Frankfurt family: painting.

“Three - Jewish female painters from Frankfurt” exhibition hall, Schulstrasse 1a, until December 19, open Wednesdays and Thursdays from 2pm to 8pm and Fridays to Sundays from 2pm to 6pm.

Finissage with presentation of the catalog on December 19 from 4 p.m.