Rebekka Ana Aimée Stuhlemer at Suprainfinit

Artist: Rebekka Ana Aimée Stuhlemer

Exhibition title: holding a shell walking a line

Venue: Suprainfinit, Bucharest, Romania

Date: September 8 – October 8, 2022

Photography: Mihaela Vezentan / New Folder Studio , all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit, Bucharest

Hovering over the large sheets of unstretched canvases, Rebekka Stuhlemer’s paintings are portals that connect bodily and environmental realms, that channel movement and colours in complex and intuitive compositions. Her works are fugitive, fragmented, corporeal, they cross-contaminate and self-distance. Their infused movement sparks a soft level of animism that is carried along by the gaze of the viewer.

What is compelling about the artist’s practice is the manner in which she situates herself – intuitively and physically – within multiple ecosystems that undermine the Cartesian mind-centered understanding of human existence. Whereas her expressive brush strokes and bright, watery colours share abstractionist features, the artist’s insertions of micro-organic elements create a specific system of proceeding in time and body. Each brush stroke reacts to the previous one and by keeping a small distance between each of the lines, the final assemblage morphs together all its forming parts.

The exhibition holding a shell, walking a line presents a series of four site-specific paintings that merge with each other and that were initially determined by the usage of the dark blue colour. Painted in multiple layers, the artist took her textiles outdoors and painted the first layer in different environments, by the river Rhine or at the beach, allowing the elements of these natural environments to pervade the canvas, to infiltrate the shapes of the brush strokes. Dust and studio dirt leave traces in Stuhlemer’s artworks, and the intuitive feeling for colour continues the artist’s symbiotic relation with the inner and outer environment. Immediate and visceral with her work, the artist finds comfort in “the right to opacity” rather than in the need for transparency that is asked from us in western societies. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components, claims Éduard Glissant in his text about opacity. The painting process does not start with ideas, she does not seek words around her, nor a descriptive shell around her paintings. Contingency is deeply rooted in the moves of her brush and in the hand-made prepared pigmented hues. While the shades bleed amongst themselves, the lines surrender to the distance. Molecular moves happen not only within the painterly surfaces, but also within the artist’s embodied interaction with the work. Bending over the large-scale canvases, forging this performative closeness to the painting process itself, Stuhlemer only uncovers her larger perspective onto the work at the end of the painting process. She gazes at the work while it hangs. Before that, it’s action, gesture, eroticism, colour sensitivity.

Softening the architecture of multiple building facades in the gallery’s neighborhood, the outdoor installation of paintings knots a visual and somatic dialogue between the textile works and the often hard surfaces of the buildings. There is an unexpected meeting point in the hanging of the works while the architectural boundaries are swallowed by the large cavity of the canvases. The outdoors textiles inhale and exhale the environment they are conceived and exhibited in, relinquishing any possible form of control over the canvases. She does not use more than two colours in her works, and yet the bright and flaxen hues, the organic lines and creatures, the embedded movement dwell in a collective body that is not only hers, but the surroundings’ also.

-Curatorial text by Cristina Vasilescu