FRANZISKA GOES

In works like warmer Schatten / Our Tools Shape Us, 2022, an array of shapes—a small rectangular band of yellow and blue with discernible brushstrokes, a hard-edged swathe of reddish pink applied with fastidious flatness, amorphous sections of mottled patterns, meandering lines that overlap all of this—puzzle together into an idiosyncratic constellation. Each aspect of the painting arises from a unique combination of technique, colour and form, but is also contiguous to other dimensions of the painting, so each part is perceived in dialogue with another.

A reflection on technology is also present in these hyper-flat, acrylic surfaces, as Goes often employs a screen-like blur as well as multicoloured pixels. While she remains wholly committed to painting as a medium, she integrates a kind of digital imagining into her process by manipulating her sketches or photographs of her paintings in a program that allows her to try out new configurations. Her practice is, on the other hand, emphatically tactile, as she employs a wide range of brushes, rolls and tools to create her works’ wide medley of textures.

It is telling that many of Goes’s titles are separated by a slash: In the Woods / Feeling Magenta, plus minus / blau gelb or botanische Ordnung / bräunliche Laubfarbe, as it’s often the tension of seeming opposition like that between nature and technology, contrasting colours or dissonant shapes, that drives her practice. The notion of a grid of sensation is another such dialectic. She is also closely attuned to the great freedom that can accompany constraint, a seeming paradox that she accesses by limiting her colours for a painting (or group of paintings) to a preselected palette. By limiting herself to roughly half-a-dozen, often vibrant colours, she allows herself to run the full gamut of atmosphere and tone with a real experimental verve.

— Camila McHugh