Exhibition Catalogue (German) →

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Corita Kent: where have all the flowers gone was curated for Museum Penzberg – Sammlung Campendonk in 2024, the second institutional exhibition of Kent's work in Germany. The exhibition presented four decades of work by the California-based artist Corita Kent (1918–1986), a pioneering figure who moved between the roles of printmaker, educator, public intellectual, and Sister of the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles. In her serigraphies, Kent fused the aesthetic experience of everyday life with spiritual messages, literary quotations, and popular culture. Often called the "Pop Art nun," this designation does not do justice to the range of her person, neither artistically nor in terms of her role within her community. The exhibition traced the artist's versatility, her constant experimentation, and her "joyful revolutionary" sensibility across distinct stylistic periods, from early religious figurative works of the 1950s that recall German Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism, through the text-based Pop Art prints of the 1960s and 70s, to the more introspective watercolors of the 1980s.

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Kent's early works from 1951 to 1962 engage with a tradition of religious imagery rooted in medieval iconography. In serigraphies like "immaculate heart," "passion," and "seven swords – blue," Kent was preoccupied not solely with capturing religious scenes but with Christ and Mary's human experience, developing an aesthetic Christianity in which remote and divine figures assume the sensations of everyday people. Her early use of color and form, at times bordering on abstraction, draws the viewer into a space between devotional contemplation and mystical experience, already building a visual language in which the mystical and the popular co-exist.

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In the 1960s, Kent's work transformed into a kind of Pop lexicon. Like Warhol and Ruscha, she turned to familiar, ordinary objects and texts as the basis for her prints, co-opting mass-produced forms and production techniques of screen printing that derived from consumer culture. Her practice employed the methods and tools of Pop Art in dialogue with the reforms of Vatican II, mobilizing the visual language of mass media to carry messages of spirituality and social justice. In 1965, Kent stated her position: "The idea is to beat the system of advertising at its own game. Pop artists use these signs and do something else to them. The idea is to oppose crass realism and crass materialism with religious values, or at least with real values."

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Although Kent received widespread public recognition as a Pop Artist during her lifetime, she was not comparatively placed within the institutional canon of Pop Art. This was largely due to the fact that she was both a woman and part of a religious order. Since 2000, historians and curators have made a concerted effort to recognize her place within the discourse.