Presentation House Gallery

From 1972 to 1977, Marianne Wex took thousands of photographs of women and men in the streets of Hamburg. These images, together with re-photographed images from mass media, were assembled into an indepth archive and a book entitled Let's Take Back Our Space: "Female" and "Male" Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (1979). This collection forms a remarkable sociological study of how we create and present ourselves, and the degree to which gender-specific conditioning and hierarchies are reflected through everyday pose, gesture, and pre-verbal communication.

Marianne Wex was born in 1937 in Hamburg, and now lives in Hohr-Grenzhausen, Germany. She studied at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg and taught there from 1963 to 1980. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she showed her work in national and international solo and group exhibitions (including at NGBK Berlin, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Bonner Kunstverein, and ICA London). Wex's photo panels were shown in 2009 at Focal Point Gallery in London and in 2012 at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Germany and Yale Union in Portland, Oregon. Avigail Moss has been conducting in-depth research on the Marianne Wex project for many years.