Artist Sascha Braunig Will Mess With Your Head
The rising young painter gets even bolder in her first institutional solo show at Norway’s Kunsthall Stavanger.
Sascha Braunig’s trippy canvases, with their biomorphic forms and glow-in-the-dark op-art patterning, can wreak havoc on your vision. Foreground, background, and subject appear to fuse seamlessly. Based in Portland, Maine, the artist, 32, paints from sculptures she builds and lights, adding embellishment on the canvas (Warm Leatherette, 2015, below). Included in the New Museum’s 2015 Triennial following her much-buzzed-about solo shows at New York’s Foxy Production, Braunig gets her first institutional solo show this month, at Norway’s Kunsthall Stavanger on May 26. Lately, she’s been making bold, pillar-shaped paintings inspired by ancient herma statues—plain stone posts topped with realistic busts, “with genitalia inexplicably poking out at the appropriate level,” she says. Her works are growing bolder, she notes, and “invite the viewer to engage with them in a more bodily way.”
Warm Leatherette, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Foxy Production, New York.
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