Group exhibition with works by Kerstin Brätsch, Ryo Kinoshita, Sarah Księska, Natasja Mabesoone and Anh Trần

Kerstin Brätsch, Fossil Psychic for Christa, 2020, plaster, pigments, glue, wax and oil on honeycomb, felt, 49 x 39 x 6 cm.

 12 March - 30 April 2022

​Galerie Fons Welters presents a group exhibition with work by Kerstin Brätsch, Ryo Kinoshita, Sarah Ksieska, Natasja Mabesoone and Anh Trần. The exhibition brings together artists that challenge, alter, reject, and reflect upon the tradition of modernist painting. Each artist approaches painting from their own perspective and together they show the width of the medium’s possibilities. The painterly language is simultaneously challenged and confirmed. In their work abstraction and figuration, decoration and ‘high-art’, the artist as a genius (artisthood) and artisanship are no longer separated; they extend and reinforce each other. 

Sarah Księska, Trap, 2022, oil and acrylics on aluminum, 112 x 75 cm.

Kerstin Brätsch's work is 'about extending painting'. By exploring various media, she questions painting from different points of view. Brätsch examines the limits of the material in order to bring it into dialogue with contemporary painting. In the works Fossil Psychic for Christa (both 2020), Brätsch applies the 17th century Italian technique stucco marmo. Pigments are mixed with wet plaster and glue and then polished to imitate marble or other rare stones. Brätsch’s works evoke not only brush strokes, they essentially appear as fossils, storing time and history.

In his practice, Ryo Kinoshita examines the porous sculptural quality of material he paints upon, such as canvas, jute, velvet and linen. The woven structures, with gaps and overlappings, of these fabrics have informed his visual language. The sensory quality of the material plays a central role in his painting process. Kinoshita's works initially appear as decorative abstract woven or stitched patterns. However, these patterns are composed of a multitude of intertwined oil-painted figures, forms and objects. The repetition of these elements, sometimes playful, erotic or even violent, creates the rhythmic abstract pattern characteristic of Kinoshita's work.

In her surrealist paintings, Sarah Księska likes to inhabit the blurred line between the real and unreal. The unconscious plays an important role, which results in the dream like quality of her work. The unconscious is preverbal, its language consists mainly of images; dreams create a timeless space. They not only help to understand a personal past, but also contain ideas about the future. Księska likes this superposition of two opposites. It creates a space which she tries to capture in her paintings. Księska’s process starts by drawing and combining images into collages on a tablet. She translates these images with various painting techniques on aluminium panels. 

Natasja Mabesoone’s practice strings thoughts on reproducibility and repetition together with a reflection on femininity and minor aesthetics such as decoration, craft, and materials like marker, glitter, scratch letters and templates. Mabesoone’s work deals with notions of sensuality, cuteness, language as a locus of the political and the erotic – and the social constructions they entail. Her visual language derives from board games, New Narrative and feminist writing, flirtations with kitsch and commodity aesthetics, word-play and puns. To create the subtle, drawing-like structure of her work she uses vernis mou, an etching technique in which objects like flowers, textiles or embossed paper are pressed into a soft, waxy ground before placing the plate into a mordant. This fundamental layer concedes additional imagery such as monotypes and drawings to waft on top of, through or underneath it.

Anh Trần employs painting as a medium to challenge Western ideas about abstract painting. Trần reflects on and utilises painting methodologies and materials used by abstract painters of the Western canon, to engage with the fluctuating distances between critical discourses in contemporary painting and non-Western or hybrid painting practices. Often creating large scale works, her practice draws on a painterly-language that responds to spontaneous energy and sensations. The titles, symbols, and words visible in her recent work allude to personal experiences and practice that Trần is developing while doing the residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam (NL).

GALERIE FONS WELTERS
Bloemstraat 140
1016 LJ Amsterdam
www.fonswelters.nl

Open Tues - Sat 1-6 PM and by appointment

Natasja Mabesoone, No delicacies, such superfluities, 2020/2021, layered soft ground etch, marker, graphite, coloured pencil and oil crayon on paper, 65,5 x 51 cm.

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