Käthe Schönle

Painterly Architectures
The Cascade Collages of Käthe Schönle

“The empty sketchbook lies before me, page after page to be filled, layer after layer. Like sediment, experiences, encounters and thoughts are deposited, as what one perceives as being of oneself and of others.” Käthe Schönle

Sketchbooks have accompanied Käthe Schönle from the beginning of her artistic career. Existential questions about life filling page on page – a preoccupation that continues to drive her multifaceted work to this day. This constant activity is driven by two poles, coalesced over the course of her career. Firstly, an attempt to bring philosophical questions together with artistic expression, and secondly, a fascination for the material upon which this encounter takes place. Schönle moves from paper to canvas and returns, caught in an interplay between the two. Into this mix come new materials, a foray into space, to installation and, now and then, a step into the applied.

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For Schönle, art means to transform material and to explore the limits of meaning, aesthetics and physical relations. An interest in hybrids, ambiguities and complexities pervades her entire oeuvre. Collage, the haptic and spiritual origin of artistic amalgamation, serves as an important accomplice in this preoccupation. Max Ernst described the technique of collage as ‘the systematic exploitation of the accidental, the artificially provoked meeting of two or more alien realities on an apparently unsuitable level – and the spark of poetry that jumps over when these realities converge.’1 It comes as no surprise that Schönle has a passion for the great Dadaist.

In screen printing, Schönle‘s interest in contrasts and interruptions – in overlays and clear boundaries – combine perfectly.In her new series, she tests how much layering an arrangement can accept and remain harmonious. Screen printing enables the artist to precisely delineate her repertoire of forms. The paper is printed on again and again and through this, printed and painted paper elements are bound together. For the alert reader, this repetition of stencils folds the subject of time into the paper, showing Schönle‘s restless testing of the medium.

Modules of content and technique interlock, constantly repositioning, building together to form a complex architecture of imagery. The precision on which these works hang depend in equal measure upon courageous juxtapositions and careful reductions, balancing condensation with empty space. Bringing new meaning to the old adage, Schönle repeatedly proves that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Although handling print is not entirely new to Schönle, it is raised to new levels in this recently created series, fed by the artist’s success at transforming the painterly into dialogue with the printed. With Schönle, these typically flat areas of print possess strong painterly qualities, demonstrating the broad scope of screen printing when in the right hands.

The focus of the Cascade series is a vigorous examination of colour and the potential of form. Abstraction and figuration complement one another, areas read as organic structures, approximations of characters and landscape emerge, only to evaporate again in the overall experience. Käthe Schönle offers simultaneous spaces of perception. Where the stencils come together, ambiguous chains of association are instigated, often with a cheeky wink to be found glinting through the layers.

But it’s not just about juggling shapes. It’s also about taking thoughts for a walk, accompanied by various, shifting schools of thought. Among others, the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty – who brought thoughts about perception and physicality together in the first half of the 20th century – currently occupy Schönle. The body is omnipresent in her work, not only as a form, but also as a concept, pacing the boundaries, inside and out: “I don’t need to look elsewhere for the others, I find them within my own experience. They inhabit the niches, those that contain what is hidden from me, yet visible to them,”2 writes Merleau-Ponty. He aptly describes, without having intended to, experiencing art which knows how to touch one in a fundamentally human way, because it acts from all sides at once.

Schönle combines philosophy and art history, allowing her own perception to flow in as, with a technical knack, she translates her unmistakable imagery into screenprints, screenprints in which the principle of collage – of coming together – are confirmed.

 

Paula Watzl, April 2021

Translated by Sam Bunn, June 2021

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