Margit Palme. New Arrivals

Confident, expressive female figures are the protagonists in Margit Palme’s (1939–2025) graphic works. Her aquatints on paper were created over a period of six decades and are characterised by precise linework and a limited color palette. Across various series, the artist appropriates gendered projections onto women’s bodies, subverting and playing with them. Her themes include fashion and fabrics, idealised bodies, the depiction of animals, sport and leisure, solitude, and life in the big city.

Margit Palme was an Austrian painter and graphic artist. After training at the Vienna-Hetzendorf School of Fashion, Palme studied graphic design and lithography in both Linz and Salzburg and devoted herself almost exclusively to aquatint etching from the late 1950s onwards. Her work is primarily concerned with the depiction of women, deploying a colour palette that, from the late 1960s onwards, increasingly aligned with the emerging aesthetics of Pop Art.

On the occasion of an exhibition in 2023, she donated twenty of her prints to the Ludwig Forum. In 2026, the artist’s daughter, Iris Barbara Kubowsky, gifted the museum a further twenty-three works. Created between 1971 and 2025, these works significantly enrich the Ludwig Forum’s collection of important female positions on Pop Art, thereby enabling a critical re-examination and expansion of the understanding of the movement, which remains dominated by predominantly US male artists. The donation will be presented in two parts: from October to January, the focus will be on body image, depictions of animals and city life. Starting in mid-January, the second part of the presentation will feature works on the themes of fashion and fabrics, constraints and masks.

With thanks to Margit Palme & Iris Barbara Kubowsky.

Credits: Margit Palme, Ohne Titel, 1996. Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, donation of the artist’s daughter, Iris Barbara Kubowsky. Photo: Carl Brunn