Sascha Braunig - February 2021
“Each day at Surf Point, I woke up to the bright daylight and a feeling of possibility and excitement. After a year of collective grief, I thought a lot about geologic time versus human lifespans, i.e. creativity and mortality, thoughts that were sometimes mournful but other times liberatory. Whether or not I acted on these potentialities, I experienced a creative opening that was completely distinct from my usual studio routine. I believe the combination of the location of the building on the Atlantic coast and the benevolent spirit of its designers and former occupants, Beverly and Mary-Leigh, form a heightened receptivity to creative thought. I took the glow of this feeling back to normal life and it continues to infuse my activities.”
Like many painters before me, I’m interested in the confines of the canvas, a necessarily restraining space. I ask questions of this historically masculine rectangle: in what ways can the femme figure occupy the frame? Is this relationship inevitably a sadomasochistic one, with its preconditions of boundaries and control? Within the shallow boxes or voided theatrical backdrops of my work, my subject’s relationship to the frame that tightly confines her has grown from the pessimistic immobility of "Hide" or "Tenterhooks" to the fledgling boundary-testing of "Unseen Forces". Although these issues of framing and figuration, based in art history, still fascinate me, over the last three years I’ve introduced the image of the witch and gestures derived from ancient Near Eastern fertility goddesses ("The Offering") in order to propose these questions in an explicitly feminist way. I feel urgently compelled to make images of powerful female figures that simultaneously acknowledge the unstable conditions under which that power can exist. Their postures are strong, sometimes menacing ("The Witch") and sometimes playful ("The Curtain") but they also appear to be made of provisional materials such as paper, fabric, and plastic - or neon, the ultimate shortcut lure to pleasure. As I navigate these shifts in subject matter, I’m also tackling larger-scale paintings with more complex compositions. It’s exciting and challenging to take on more ambitious elements, but it’s also a learning process and I’m still a student of my expanded scale.
More of Sascha’s work can be found here.