KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers) at Deborah Schamoni

Artists: KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers)

Exhibition title: HISTORY_HERSTORY

Venue: Deborah Schamoni, Munich, Germany

Date: February 3 – March 25, 2023

Photography: Ulrich Gebert, all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Deborah Schamoni, Munich

KAYA (no secret) are Kerstin Brätsch and Debo Eilers. The two artists merged practices in 2010, uniting in the form of an allegorical Other with the first name of Kaya Serene, their then 12-year-old patron saint. Key motifs, concepts, and techniques identified in the collaboration’s earliest show at 179 Canal in New York would continue to feature prominently in KAYA’s work thereafter: paintings were sliced, patched, re-tuned again and again. A reclining figure played a sick painting.

Subsequent exhibitions would sometimes involve other guests and performers. Like their namesake Kaya, these invited Others act as a kind of antimatter that collides with Brätsch/Eilers’ art practice, unleashing energies that derail common notions of art production. It oscillates as a state of perpetual experimental excitement.

The pictures expose painting as a bag of tricks, not least because they play with the gestural and aggressively engage in tricks of their own. They dissect painterly platitudes and routines, print using various techniques, perform surgical interventions. This is painting on mirrors, painting on transparent foil, painting with bathtub handles, painting with lashing straps and belts, as if they were meant to be worn or strapped on like bondage gear. Cronenberg would have had a field day! But KAYA is not content to skirmish with corporatist phantasmagoria or technological frills. No, they show cruel, irreversible futures.

The result is technical landscapes created as allegories of a new world, into which elements of our surroundings and even parts of ourselves already extend and stand ready to be thrown back over us in digested form.

The works in HISTORY_HERSTORY have their origins in a summer workshop at TROPEZ in Berlin. At the time, children cut pieces out of canvases (a series of coloring book pictures) and used these scraps to build their own talisman. Then, at Bärenzwinger Berlin, the female bear (Kerstin) patched these cut-up paintings together and used them to heal and warm the sick painting (Debo) lying motionless on the floor. Thus charged, the pictorial objects made their way to the Villa Romana in Florence. They flew to the Athens Biennale before landing at Kunstverein Braunschweig. Each location found the painted objects transformed by performative interventions, serving variously as a floor or a bedspread and playing the role of an exhibition piece as if it were a matter of course. As is the case here.

The present exhibition sees the alien KAYA devour its spawn. Devouring is the ornamental amalgamation of different visual systems. Devouring is the assimilation and digestion that gives KAYA’s body new forms and functions. KAYA’s previous performative, sculptural, installative layering has merged once more in the two-dimensional logic of painting.

HISTORY_HERSTORY features a new series of paintings: second- and third-order hybrids that flaunt their retrospective character, if only in the interest of setting the bar of painting even higher with this self-digestion. Note: “KAYA is unstoppable experimental research that delivers us new insights!” To which KAYA counters: “Ik Bün bet op e Huut Natt Worn.”

– Stephan Dillemuth (translated from German)

Installation view KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), HISTORY_HERSTORY, 2023

KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Bärenzwinger I, 2017–2022, Acrylic, patches, UV print, linen on linen, 175 x 130 cm

KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Ik Bün bet op e Huut Natt Worn_KAYA Portrait, 2017–2022, Acrylic, patches, UV print, grommets, linen on canvas, 175 x 130 cm

KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Ik wollt di juemmer draepen_KAYA House, 2017–2022, Acrylic, patches, UV print, linen on canvas, 175 x 130 cm

KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Baar Baar Baar_Bärenzwinger, 2017–2022, Acrylic, patches, UV print, linen on linen, 175 x 130 cm

KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), KAYA Portrait, 2017–2022, Acrylic, patch, UV print, gold and silver leaf, grommets, oil paint, canvas on canvas, 175 x 130 cm

KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Dat gröne Licht_Catacomb mirror, 2017–2022, Acrylic, patches, UV print, canvas on linen, 130 x 175 cm

KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Süük_Fondazione Memmo, 2017–2022, Acrylic, patches, UV print, gold and silver leaf, metal flakes, pigment, oil, grommets, linen on canvas, 175 x 130 cm

KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Catacomb lamp_Stanley, 2022, LED lights, electrical wire, leather, epoxy, metal, glass paint, silver leaf, 166 x 106 x 76 cm

KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Catacomb lamp_Hamilton Beach, 2022, LED lights, electrical wire, leather, epoxy, metal, glass paint, silver leaf, 200 x 54 x 45 cm

KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Slaap Goot_Bärenzwinger, 2017–2022, Acrylic, patch, UV print, linen on canvas, 175 x 130 cm

KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Bärenzwinger II, 2017–2022, Acrylic, patch, UV print, gold leaf, linen on canvas, 175 x 130 cm