Kerstin Brätsch’s paintings explore the ways the body can be expressed psychologically, physically, and socially. She draws on an expansive history of painting including mosaics, stained glass, paper marbling, and stucco marmo and stretches across modes of production such as oil paint on Mylar, digital hybrids, multifaceted installations, and collaborations. Brätsch uses psychics and mediums to question her own belief in painting, examining paintings’ mystical dimensions through their infinite potential readings. Within plainly visible support structures such as wood or steel frames, the artist mobilises sophisticated material technologies to mesmerising ends. Wächter (life is Beautifool _heiliger Johannes) (2012–2021) comprises stained glass, sliced agate rock, and an artist-made steel armature that pushes the work into three-dimensional, architectural space. In Brushstroke Fossils for Christa (Stucco Marmo, with gratitude to Walter Cipriani) _FACE and Brushstroke Fossils for Christa (Stucco Marmo, with gratitude to Walter Cipriani) _MAN (both 2019–2021), the painting gesture becomes a body of fossilised fragments. Taken as a whole, the entire environment is a painting dissected into its constituent parts that work with light, material, form, and shapes to push the limit of what a painting can actually be.
Melanie Kress
