Mia Florentine Weiss

The LOVE HATE sculpture is an ambigram that can be read as a mirror image. On one side you read LOVE, when you look at the work in the mirror, you read HATE. The sculpture by German concept and performance artist Mia Florentine Weiss, which has been shown in over twenty cities, is a symbol for a change of perspective and is now one of the most photographed works of art in public spaces.

The LOVE HATE sculpture is undoubtedly the most powerful work in Mia Florentine Weiss’ oeuvre. With it, the artist has succeeded in condensing the hopes and fears of a time of dramatic social and political upheaval into a significant work that at the same time remains open to the personal views of its viewers. In this respect, it can be compared to its great American predecessor, the LOVE sculpture (1970) by Robert Indiana. With the simple yet complex design of the four letters in a neutral Times font, the American pop artist succeeded in expressing the attitude to life of an entire generation in the early 1970s, for whom the Beatles symbolically sang “All you need is love”. He was always concerned with the simplicity and clarity of his sign.

With her LOVE HATE sculpture, Mia Florentine Weiss has found another unmistakable symbol with which she simultaneously promotes commitment and change. The artist has been wearing her “two-word poem” branded in white ink on both of her wrists since its conceptual and artistic creation – a transformation of the artist and her work! It is to be hoped that this powerful symbol with its many facets of form and content will conquer the world just as Robert Indiana’s “one-word poem” once did.

Text by Dr. Bettina Ruhrberg, Mönchehaus Museum

The focus of Mia Florentine Weiss’s artistic work is the core question of human comfort: WHAT IS YOUR PLACE OF PROTECTION?(Video installation 2000-2016), which has been consistently running through her work since 1999. In her work, Weiss juxtaposes the extremes of human emotions. In her work, Weiss contrasts the extremes of human emotions. She works in the area of tension between object, art, and multimedia.

She seeks to transcend borders, always looking for unity and contradiction, which she symbolizes through the collapse of opposites, which can be seen in the sculptural ambigram LOVE HATE (1999). It not only stands for the Faustian nature that exists within us as humans, but gains a new meaning, 100 years after the end of the First World War, as an international symbol of peace striving to transform the current hatred of the world into love. As part of the Faust Festival Munich 2017, the so-called “one-word poem” was historically installed for over a year at the famous Siegestor Arch.

Since 2014 the artist has been traveling along the European borders and has documented the refugee crisis both on water and on land (EDGES OF EUROPE) with a taxidermied white horse (PEGASUS PROJECT 2015). The dialectic between heaven and earth, or utopia and reality, is symbolized by the Pegasus sculpture. The project was exhibited under the motto “Nature Meets Culture“ in the Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt am Main (ANTHROPOCENE 2016).

This type of seismographic work was also revealed in the neon installation NOW WON, a temporary installation in front of the Berlin Reichstag in 2017. After the group exhibition BREAKING NEWS at Museum Möncheberg in 2018, Weiss shifted her focus to Europe at the Crossroads. The exhibition KREUZWEG in the Nikolaikirche in Berlin – Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin – illustrates an oversized, deposited cross that is embedded on the earth of the 47 European countries: a cross becoming a crossroads. The exhibition was funded by the Capital Culture Fund of the City of Berlin.

The widespread campaign #LOVEUROPE began during the European elections in 2019 with the LOVE HATE sculpture at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and then travelled across the continent supported by partners and supporters in various European cities, as well as in Moscow. The sculptures have come to represent a demographic unity between all people, and have been installed in prominent and historically important locations, such as the Monchehaus Museum in Goslar, the European Parliament, and Berlin’s East Side Gallery, to name a few.

With the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the work of art accompanied Germany’s EU Council Presidency, which began in July 2020 at the European Parliamentary building in Brussels.

The sculptures now take the transatlantic leap to the USA as a sign of a change of perspective and solidarity across cities and national borders.They will be appearing in Farragut Square in Washington DC in November 2022, followed by an exhibition at SXSW: South by Southwest in Austin in March 2022, and at The Nantucket Project in September.