2023.2.9 – 3. 11
Sabrina Podemski

In car tuning, show ’n shine events are competitions where all that matters is the look and polish of the tuning: it’s all about seeing and being seen, superficiality reigns. Sabrina Podemski does not hide her ambivalent interest in the tuning scene as a non-academic aesthetic practice with a tendency to break the rules. On the contrary: not only is the title of her exhibition borrowed from the world of tuning, she has also incorporated some of the techniques and optical effects from the craft into her stainless steel sculptures, as witnessed recently in the exhibition Need for Speed for the Mur Brut series in the parking garage of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. The “shift” element is not only a reference to her self-assured use of a supposedly extremely masculine and cliché-ridden scene, but rather to her approach to painting and art in general—the act of shifting certain signs and meanings that are particularly prevalent in abstract painting, as well as the search for her own codes, her own visual world within abstract painting that can function independently without always having to distinguish itself from something that already exists.

Sabrina Podemski explores issues relating to visual culture through the medium of painting. What exactly is an image, and what opportunities does it have to leave its support behind? Where is the boundary between the “picture” as a material object and the “image” as a representation—as something that can be transferred from one medium to another? This leads the artist to create a repertoire of images based on real objects or her own sculptures that mutate from three dimensions to two and back to three again, or else become entirely new images in the form of shadows, superimpositions or transposition errors.

Her formal interest in textures and surfaces, brushstrokes and the information they carry (over), flatness and plasticity, and painting versus printing is always intertwined with her affinity for social and pop culture trends, fashions and scenes. She works with the material properties of ceramics—the smooth surface that can also have cracks, its inherent heaviness, the fragility yet sturdiness of fired clay—while simultaneously treating the punching bag as a purely formal object, as a sculpture or installation in the space. Lastly, there is the change in the viewers’ perception brought about by a familiar object in a different material. What do viewers feel when they see the glazed white punching bag hanging from the ceiling or packed in a box like a fragile artifact—and not as a readymade, but as an artificial, replicated form? What type of reaction does it provoke and how does it influence the space?

The artist applies the same questions to the chains attached to the punching bags. Here, too, a fundamental interest in a material and a symbolic image charged with references meet the need for a way of fastening the ceramic objects to the ceiling and the intention to create a total installation in the space. This means to an end becomes an image in its own right, one that could just as easily make the leap to the canvas of a future painting.

Sabrina Podemski also stages her exhibitions as visual spaces into which her own codes and “images” overflow and the theoretical level continues. Just as her paintings never begin with a white canvas, but always with a pattern or a kind of background noise, and play with surfaces as well as positive and negative effects, the space she occupies is never a pure white cube, and if it is, then this is a very deliberate decision. The pictures do not all need to hang on the wall and be seen in their entirety; it is enough that they are present, not visible, but taking their place in the space as part of a complex of works—work and wall, image and image support are thus mutually dependent. In the exhibition Shift ’n Shine, the interweaving of work and space is achieved by transferring structures from the material to the wall. For example, the acoustic foam from the crates containing the punching bags becomes a wall work, while the wooden gallery floor is reproduced on the exterior of the crates. It is entirely possible that this exact structure will find its way into a future painting.

Sabrina Podemski’s work always finds a material output, whether as an image, painting, sculpture, or installation—but an essential part of her work occurs on a parallel, conceptual level, in the continuation of (visual) theoretical, sociopolitical, and pop culture streams of thought, which, like the “images” in her works, permeate and stimulate each other and are never at rest.

Leonie Pfennig

ACHENBACH HAGEMEIER
Kennedydamm 1, 40476 Düsseldorf

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