We are delighted to present Sabrina Fritsch in her third solo-exhibtion at VAN HORN.

In SKIN, the artist shows relief-like paintings that combine color with the notion of ​​skin as a polymorphic layer in the image. Veins that become visible, delicate and rough adhesions, velvety surfaces, as well as skin tissues that describe injuries or forms of body ornaments. The works on display are painted textile reliefs that reveal Fritsch’s cautious dealing with surface structures and evoke associations with the fine, yet robust, organic material.

What happens when skin visually expands volume?
How corporal is color as material?
And how does a tactile imagery emerge on canvas?

In her paintings, Sabrina Fritsch explores the possibilities that painting opens with surface and color as well as the motivic potential of abstract images. Within the exhibition the idea of ​​skin, as the one material that can take on various forms, becomes the reference image of Fritsch’s work on color and texture. The new paintings speak of the search for beauty and its ambivalent conditions. Therefore, the artist proceeds subtly, almost alchemistic. She creates contrasts and opposes them with each other in order to bring them ultimately back into one. Her large-format reliefs show powdery, fine, geometrically precise pictorial architectures that encounter small-scale, pure works that leave archaic emblematic traces.

The exhibition creates a dualism of the calculable and its refraction. A relief-like ductus of corporeal surfaces, which alternately holds and picks up again, keeping the viewer’s gaze in motion. What does the eye relate to and what leads to a narration? Through the recurrent approach to the works, the paintings become riddles of ambivalent surface structures, which arise from the shape of an ideal and the “mole of the inconvenient“.

* from the conversation with Sabrina Fritsch on August 7, 2018