The three thousand workers who were employed in the Leipzig cotton mill before reunification have by no means disappeared without a trace.

Their business has meanwhile become an internationally renowned hotspot of the local cultural scene.

However, the wooden stools that the women left behind after the settlement are still in place today.

Rosa Loy, who early on moved into a studio in the factory complex built at the end of the nineteenth century, had a use for the benches.

Now they serve the painter not only as a practical utensil.

In her art, too, one encounters the modest piece of furniture again and again.

Such a piece serves as a seat for a young woman, who is in the foreground of the painting "Imkerwinter" from 2014.

She is seen in a predominantly yellow-toned landscape with a second woman wearing a beekeeper's hat and handling a beehive.

Both are located between other beehives, one of which is also on a stool.

Behind it, a narrow wooden house towers over a fir-covered hill.

A black stove and a black box on the left edge of the picture contrast with the pale coloring.

The broken color is by no means honey yellow.

First and foremost, however, she makes associations with the product of the beekeepers.

The snow that covers the roof and cornices of the house alone refers to the eponymous season.

The two and a half meter high depiction of this situation, which is borrowed from everyday life on the one hand and seems mysterious on the other, is one of the central exhibits in an exhibition in the Women's Museum in Wiesbaden.

It is titled "Flaneurin" and brings together forty of Loy's works from the period since 1997. In addition to prints, one sees watercolors and ink drawings as well as paintings in various sizes in harmonious alternation.

Frozen Dream Tales

The title of the show refers to a booklet-sized woodcut from 2017, with which the two-story tour ends.

It shows a woman with a screen-like skirt walking a tortoise, strutting rather than strolling.

The gnarled tree, which stretches its crown behind it, does not appear to be firmly rooted, but apparently wants to keep up with the unequal couple.

The sheet is programmatic not only because it provides another example of the figurative dream worlds inhabited exclusively by women that Loy creates in her motifs.

The small graphic is also an expression of a work that is rich in variety in terms of format and technique, thematically and stylistically coherent at the same time.

Loy's pictorial ideas seem so enigmatic because a possible narrative is frozen like a film still.

One can hardly decipher them, although they draw from a realistic range of forms and often conjure up art history.

In her paintings, the artist prefers to use casein, whose matt chalky surface is reminiscent of Renaissance frescoes.

The painting “Moonlight” from 2004 is also composed like a traditional Pietà – with the difference that the child, who is holding the mother in her arms, has the body of a young woman, while its limbs liquefy and appear in light, wavy lines over a dark background meander.

The view of a hairdressing salon, filled with minimalist rows of naked wigs, is reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical painting.

The work of an artist who was born in Zwickau in 1958 and trained at the Academy for Graphics and Book Art in Leipzig is automatically searched for references to socialist realism.

You will find what you are looking for, among other things, with two female astronauts in bright yellow overalls dancing together.

Similarities with the art of her husband Neo Rauch, with whom she works wall to wall in Leipzig, cannot be overlooked either.

The tentacle-like fabric sausages that crown the only sculpture presented in Wiesbaden look as if they were created by Louise Bourgeois.

For this, Loy has stacked the wooden stools she once saved into a tower, which the textile octopus is now clutching.

In this way, the stools once again become the link between reality and Loy's surreal art, which is not as remote as it might seem.

Because they preserve the spirit of their former use and also serve as a reminder that textile work was also a woman's job in the GDR, thus reflecting social and historical ruptures as well as biographical details.

As one of the few representatives of the so-called Leipzig School and the only one who has achieved such a prominent name,

Loy does not approach her decidedly female subject like an activist, but lightly and unsentimentally.

Just like a flaneur.

Pink Loy.

flâneur.

In the Women's Museum in Wiesbaden;

until December 11th.

The accompanying booklet costs 12 euros.