Anna Lehmann-Brauns & Sabine Dehnel
Imagine

Exhibition:
August 19 to September 24, 2022

Opening:
Thursday, August 18, 2022, 18.30h
Introduction by Gwendolyn Fässler, art historian

Artist Talk:
Saturday, August 20, 2022, 15h

Finissage:
Saturday, September 24, 2022, 13-17h

NEW Opening Hours:
Wednesday to Friday 17-19h
Saturday 13-17h
or by appointment


Anna Lehmann-Brauns
Anna Lehmann-Brauns works with the medium of photography and addresses her own memories and relevant questions of her generation in her stage-like photographic compositions. On view are colorful works from various series, up to her most recent photographs, which were taken in 2020 during a cultural exchange fellowship in Istanbul. Anna Lehmann-Brauns deals with the topos of space as a place of subjective and collective memory. The focus is not on documenting places or sceneries, but on capturing moods and descriptions of states. Although the human being is almost always invisible in her large-format and fragmentary photographs, the images speak of nothing more than his existence in imaginary traces. Anna Lehmann-Brauns, *1967 in Berlin, studied photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig with Joachim Brohm. Since the beginning of her artistic activity she has realized numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad and has been awarded many prizes and scholarships.

Sabine Dehnel
"I never really wanted to paint anything but people."
I uttered this sentence shortly after studying art and philosophy in Mainz and Los Angeles.
A vase is a decorative object, a vessel to be filled. The often bulbous and wide body of the vessel often ends in a narrow neck. On the outer wall, vases are often decorated with an ornament. Already in the Greek antiquity vases with painting were to be found. These paintings are for us today an access to the painting of that time.
I was born in the seventies, the decade when simplified, ordered, and intensely colored flowers were ubiquitous on fabrics and wallpaper. These patterns and ornaments fascinated me from the beginning and so they found their way into my painting very early - as a kind of memory store. Patterns are co-purposed, uprooted, remixed and consumed. For a while they were banned from the visual language of art as kitschy.
I wonder what patterns say about us and our time? What patterns are found in our bodies, for example?
What are the forms of synaptic connections that carry information? Do they find an equivalent outside the human body? In the ornaments of their respective time? In fashion? In art? In architecture or beyond? Why have certain patterns been passed down from generation to generation, along with finished craftsmanship? What of this is lost in our current and fast-moving times?
Vintage swimsuits serve as the starting point for the new series of staged photographs. When we learn to swim, a new pattern also inscribes itself in our bodies. Up to 1,500 repetitions are needed for a movement to become natural, i.e. automated. For me, this series is a portrait in the figurative sense and ties like a thread to my work, namely to paint pictures of people!

Sabine Dehnel was born in 1971, moved to Los Angeles after receiving her master's degree from Johannes Gu-tenberg University in Mainz, and continued her studies at Otis College of Fine Art and Design. In 2002, she was awarded the SCA Art Prize for Young Art, after which she received several European studio and fellowship grants for her work. In 2005, Dehnel moved to Berlin and set up her studio in a former barracks. In 2012, together with several artists, she founded Galerie LSD in Potsdamer Straße, which she directed for more than two years. Her work can be seen in numerous institutions, including the Museum Frieder Burda and the Columbus Art Foundation in Ravensburg, and is in renowned collections such as the DZ Bank and the National Gallery of Denmark.