Rediscovery of a legend in the exhibition »The Baroness«

Numerous modernist women artists have rightly been thrust into the spotlight in recent years, but Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is undoubtedly one of the most eccentric. Mimosa House in London is honoring her creations from May 27 to September 17 in an exhibition titled The Baroness. A selection of the few surviving originals will be complemented by poems and enter into dialogue with contemporary art makers such as Nora Gomringer, Libby Heaney, Caspar Heinemann, the Istanbul Queer Art Collective, Zuzanna Janin, Reba Maybury, Sadie Murdoch, Nat Raha, Taqralik Partridge, Liv Schulman and Astrid Seme.

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) was born Else Plötz in Germany and began her career as an erotic vaudeville artist in Berlin. She later worked as a nude model, as she could not make a living from selling her own paintings and sculptures. Von Freytag-Loringhoven's life was marked by poverty, affairs, and arrests for theft or public nudity. She received the title of nobility in 1913 through her third marriage to the impoverished Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven, with whom she lived in New York. There she was also considered a living legend because of her performances, but was unable to hold her own commercially as a woman because of her radicalism. For some years it has been suspected that von Freytag-Loringhoven is the actual creator of the readymade Fountain, which has been attributed to Marcel Duchamp and is considered by experts to be the most influential work of the 20th century.