Maximilian Thuemler's "Self-Portrait Between Miria’s Legs" employs warm tones and soft lighting to capture an intimate, domestic scene. The composition focuses on the interplay of light and shadow across the human form, with an emphasis on texture from clothing and skin. The piece challenges traditional gender norms by exploring bodily presence and absence in a modernist context, engaging with themes of identity and voyeurism. Thuemler's work seeks to critique historical and contemporary representations of gender through constructed, playful narratives within familiar spaces. ...
Maximilian Thuemler's work foregrounds the body and gives it an echo of formal interplay within its spatial surroundings. Together with Miria-Sabina Maciagiewicz, he engages in scenarios of serious play and staged self-portraits in the domestic microcosm and at select external locations. This process (re)frames their interpersonal relationship and enables gestural implications that draw from a growing catalog of mythological and art historical reference points.
These allusions include role reversals and duplications of the gendered violence embedded in the narrative origins of Western civilization. They also thematize the bias of modernist photography's legacy conflating the female body as subject and interchangeable object. Freeing these archetypes from their constraints, the work invites slippages of the male-female dichotomy and projections of the reproduced self that inhabit both the corporeal and immaterial. Thuemler simultaneously examines the things he collects, consumes, and surrounds himself with by photographing them and placing the resulting images in dialogue with the at times fragmented, obscured, and recumbent bodies. This process aims to highlight both fragility and mutability through revolving author/subject/object dynamics that enable himself and his collaborators to act as vessels that can hold each of these defined positions. ...
