Susanne Ristow began work on the series Are you A Boy? in 2021. In the midst of the pandemic, which we all remember vividly, our everyday lives have changed dramatically. Normal everyday life was no longer conceivable and it was unclear what the future would bring. The pandemic has kept the world and all of our lives on tenterhooks in different ways, but has also opened up possibilities that were previously unthinkable. In the case of Susanne Ristow’s artistic work, collaborative work with her son Konrad has opened up, who at the time was between finishing school, moving out and starting university – in other words, in a decisive phase of reorientation. A phase in which identity and life plans were being explored.

For this series of works, she has taken on the role of the model and explored physicality in various poses.
To this end, Susanne Ristow has focused on the medium of painting and created watercolours and paintings that consciously deal with the tradition of female models in European art history. Together with her son Konrad, she has worked her way through the great models of art history, but has also expanded her repertoire to include film icons and media images.She has developed a special painting technique for this purpose.

Before writing this text, I thought that I would focus on the topic of motherhood because it is so present in the conception of the series of works and continues to be a hot topic of discussion in art and culture out of necessity.It is formative and cannot be denied that female artists have experienced and continue to experience structural discrimination due to their gender and potential or actual motherhood or parenthood.I don’t want this aspect to be left unformulated.But when I saw the exhibition for the first time, I stumbled not over a motif but over a detail in the picture. The blue hand of the figure seemed familiar to me.

The series of works Are You A Boy? can therefore be located in a discourse of contemporary painting and is far more than the result of a collaboration between mother and son during and after the pandemic.
The series of works is not intended to resolve a discussion about gender roles, nor simply to depict them.Rather, it is about intervening in the cosmos of circulating images and cultural norms.The painting technique developed for this purpose supports the impression of the corporeality of her motifs and explores the charged medium of painting.Susanne Ristow has created a body of work that includes motherhood, challenges structural questions of gender and painting as a medium, consciously utilising the specific qualities of the conservative medium. (Katharina Bruns)