Member preview Kerstin Brätsch METAATEM

Welcome to the exclusive preview for members where you get to explore the exhibition before everyone else!

Before the official opening of new exhibitions, we invite our members to a preview!

Can practically anything be a painting? Kerstin Brätsch pushes the boundaries of painting as a medium, with an experimental yet playful determination.

From a feminist perspective, Brätsch works with a variety of different media – including painting, drawing, photography, video and sculpture. Yet painting is always the starting point for her artistic practice. Anything at all can be a painting, whatever materials she happens to be using. In this way, she poses questions about what painting actually is, and what it can be.    

The title METAATEM can be understood in the light of the way she complicates painting as an art form. The word ‘meta’ can be translated as ‘self-reflexiveness’, while the German word ‘Atem’ means ‘breath’ or ‘spirit’. The title refers specifically to a series of new paintings in which Brätsch addresses spiritualist, symbolist and expressive ideas about painting as a channel for spiritual energy-forces – such as breathing.   

Brätsch’s problematising of painting refers mainly to ideas dating from earlier art history about what a painting is. One of the many questions she raises concerns the idea that paintings have to be expressive, revealing the artist’s feelings, unconscious drives or the inner life of the soul. This dialogue with art history gives her work a depth and complexity, and invites you to reflect on what you consider a painting to be. 

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