JoAnna Poehlmann: Now and Then- at RedLine Milwaukee

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JoAnna Poehlmann

JoAnna Poehlmann has roots in Milwaukee stretching back to the 1850s when her forbear, Friedrich Poehlmann, founded Poehlmann’s Bakery, which flourished for 107 years on the strength of its traditional German Roggenbrot (i.e. rye bread) and cakes. It is characteristic of JoAnna Poehlmann’s art that this autobiographical fact find its way into the multifarious media that make up her oeuvre, for instance, in works such as “Flour Power” (a graphite drawing of an ornate cake and doily dating from 1969) and “Crab Cakes (After Dürer)” (miniature clay cakes set next to a postage stamp with an image of a crab drawn by Albrecht Dürer).

Indeed, "Flour Power" and "Crab Cakes (After Dürer)" point to two other signature qualities on display in “JoAnna Poehlmann: Now and Then,” a retrospective exhibition of Poehlmann’s works from the 1970s until the present, on display at RedLine Milwaukee through March 21. First, Poehlmann’s playful way of viewing the world is apparent in the pleasure she takes in puns, which are often given new dimension through the marriage of image and text (a teabag with a goat’s head at the end of its string is flavored “goatee”). Second, many of the works also show Poehlmann paying homage to teachers and inspirations, both past and contemporary. Milwaukee Surrealist and Poehlmann’s erstwhile teacher, Karl Priebe, along with Fra Filippo Lippi, Magritte, Klimt, Warhol and countless others are creatively filtered through Poehlmann’s unique artistic vision. And while their works often occasionally untouched in Poehlmann’s, their recontextualization ensure that she is no mere Xerox: “I belong to along line of people inspired by others,” she writes, “Picasso based his portrait of King Phillip IV on a painting by Velázquez, and Mozart wrote his Rondo on a theme by Beethoven. These artists weren’t aping or copying. They were paying tribute to people they held in high esteem.”

“JoAnna Poehlmann: Now and Then