SETAREH X is pleased to present Laura Sachs' second solo exhibition above / below. Through clear compositions and precise settings, the Berlin-based artist creates unique pieces that assert themselves as multi-perspective pictorial structures in space.
Laura Sachs' works operate on the borderline between painting and object. They convince through their reduced formal language, their precisely balanced arrangements, as well as through already established formal references to its surrounding architecture. These pictorial structures not only refer to their environment, but also change the way we perceive the space surrounding them in terms of its proportions, alignments and contours, and how we locate ourselves within it. In this way, Sachs' works enhance the viewer's perception of space and self, setting the foundations for a serious and potentially mind-expanding aesthetic experience.
The latest works from different series on view in this exhibition provide an overview of Laura Sachs's artistic spectrum, in which questions concerning the basic components, the specific material qualities, and the possibilities of painted and constructed images, as well as their positioning in relation to one another and in the exhibition space, are repeatedly negotiated.
In the works of the Noon series, painting is indeed observed from a new perspective: Here, black oil paint is pushed through the canvas in a first step; the fabric is then detached from the stretcher frame, reversed and re-stretched with its original backside facing the front, so that, involving a certain moment of coincidence, irregular colour structures are created and made visible on the eggshell-toned canvas fabric.
The works of the series Noon, Case as well as W are often accentuated in a respective second work step with powder-coated metal strips, which reach around the edges of the picture–thus again referring to the back of the canvases–and at the same time compositionally structure the front surface. Such 'interventions,' which in Sachs' works can also include the addition of colour fields, metal frames, fabric inlays or wood applications, are always a well-considered reaction to an intermediate state during the genesis of the picture and are usually the conclusion of a respective creation process.
Looking more closely at the colour-reduced Case pieces, which are predominantly kept in light grey, the viewer discerns a subtle material contrast between the natural rough texture of the used linen fabric and the exact settlements of metal struts as well as accurately manufactured wooden appliqués that extend beyond the canvas.
In the works of the W series, still-wet acrylic paint is washed out of the canvas and partially reapplied, creating sediment-like structures and vertical stripes of colour on the fabric, which occasionally resemble a curtain and potentially suggest a certain movement. The metal settings, which in turn appear static, seem to fix the canvas and stabilise the composition of the entire structure of the painting, thus contrasting with the surface, which tends to appear in motion.
In the singularly exhibited work Dusty H., overlapping contours are created by omissions in the black background; a pictorial construction that once again refers to formal and architectural occurrences in and outside the pictorial space. At the lower edge of the painting, two narrow rectangular white interventions form concluding accents.
The framed paper works Constructions are ultimately the smallest unit, a condensate of Sachs's vocabulary of forms and materials. Often these works, collaged from two sheets of paper, are also the starting point for larger formats of other series of works.
In addition to such special characteristics of her works, Laura Sachs artistic practice repeatedly links to formal principles that were already formulated 100 years ago at the Bauhaus, articulated in the American Minimal Art of the 1960s as one of the last avant-gardes in art history, in order to be taken up and extended in Postminimalism. Through the transition into design, fashion, and not least architecture, the minimalist concepts that emerged within art have, from today's perspective, long since been absorbed into our cultural common sense. The artist succeeds in enriching the continuing discourse on images, objects, and concepts through intentional shifts in context, returning it to a decidedly artistic approach.
At first glance, Laura Sachs' works appear serial, but upon closer inspection they turn out to be painted, composed, and constructed unique pieces that, in contrast to Minimal Art, consciously provide clues to their underlying work processes while at the same time incorporating their machine-madecomponents. Through the handwriting, the processuality, and through the distinctiveness of her reductive pictorial aesthetic, Laura Sachs formulates an independent artistic iconographic program that continuously articulates its inherent regularities and perpetuates them in new variations.
Laura Sachs (b. 1985 in Darmstadt) studied philosophy and art in Frankfurt a.M. and attended the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2013 to 2018, where she first studied under Hubert Kiecol and graduated as a 'Meisterschülerin' of Gregor Schneider. She has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows at salondergegenwart and Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, among others.
Press release courtesy SETAREH X.
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