Artist: Sarah Lehnerer
Exhibition title: I could turn myself into it instead of away from it
Venue: KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn, Switzerland
Date: November 23, 2019 – January 25, 2020
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn
Note: Text by Inka Meißner is available here (in German)
In her second solo exhibition at Kirchgasse, Sarah Lehnerer identifies with the quote I could turn myself into it instead of away from it* a moment in which a subject is confronted with the interplay between categories such as inside and outside, action and submission, informing and being informed. It empowers itself to appropriate an attitude in the interspaces between these antagonists that contribute to the formation of subjectivity and reality. It remains the idea of a movement as an attitude.
Sarah Lehnerer uses this moment as an impetus and further develops it with her works: frameworks are appropriated and displaced; demarcations become visible as porous borders; signs are adapted, redefined and rearranged; and circulating representations of virtual realities are readjusted.
In her exploration of material and traditional genre boundaries, an examination of categories such as originality and reproduction becomes also evident. Lehnerer’s approach includes brief and spontaneous interventions as well as an elaborate and precise handling of different materials and techniques.
The works on display represent the continuation of the series the artist developed in the context of her previous exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2019) as the recipient of the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship.
Inka Meißner will contribute a text to the exhibition and give a reading at the opening, thereby continuing the long-standing collaboration between the two artists.
* Ann Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, 1982
