“Her approach with surfaces and textures is pictorially precise, glazed color spaces contrast with dense and textured material. Sabrina Fritsch sets a strong and independent statement about poetic painting with her paintings and prints.” (Excerpt Art Cologne Award 2015)

In her second solo exhibition at VAN HORN Sabrina Fritsch’s works are moving in a space between abstract and figurative painting. They expand the boundaries of the genre. Emphasized reticence, silence and simplicity are constants of her sensitive works and trace her subtle work process.

The moon as a protagonist of the night sky is well known through images and medial reproductions – pictures, photos and videos of moon phases, lunar craters , light changes and eclipses – all that gives us a vague idea of the celestial body, but this is only an impression .
By visually scanning light and structure we are often deceived by recognising subjects, shapes or figures in the shades of a crater . This atmosphere of oscillating, swinging from concrete to abstract is inherent in the works of Sabrina Fritsch . The images exceed their structural or flat surfaces and on intense contemplation appear exceptionally alive.

Coarse hessian, rough canvas and an impasto of geometrically broken forms reveal a tactile surface texture and shift the graphical towards a relief. The artist creates various precise surfaces which are partly glazed, partly pastose or incorporate materials from which fragmentary shapes and depths develop – narrow joints, stepped edges and elegant shape segments, ambivalent surface texture and painted frames run from image to image.

Fritsch’s works hold their place without reaching for a concreteness based in reality – the artist leaves space for the basic components of painting – color, form and material and gives the lingering viewer the chance to follow these and trace his own language.

Sabrina Fritsch, *1979, 2015 Art Cologne Art Award for New Positions; Winner of the Marianne-Defet-Malerei-Grant; Fellow of the Kunststiftung NRW; dHCS-fellow of Kunstverein Düsseldorf; Sponsorship-winner for visual arts of the City of Düsseldorf