Landscapes5.11.2013–4.1.2014Stampa Galerie, Basel (CH)

The artistic work of Sabine Hertig (b. 1982) is marked by an excessive appropriate of images, videos, sounds, and objects. In an aggressive approach to all information media, the artist has for years been collecting images from newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. In addition to found objects and videos, this visual archive provides the foundation for her works: “For me, everything is malleable material. A newspaper image is a splotch of color. I can use everything equally for a picture. What I do is nothing other than painting.”

Since 2009 she has been creating collages in which two heterogeneous worlds and systematically confronted with each other and assembled into one homogeneous visual world or optical structure—like tapestries of memory and patchwork with a hidden seam.
Since 2011 Hertig has been work on her Landscapes: a cycle in which the images increasingly go off into the space and grow, relief-like. Her imposing works consist of combined symbols that are precisely painted or glued on, without concern for accurate perspective or existing scales. It is the search to eliminate borders while at the same time preserving space. Everything is perceived on one level, appearing in flux and rotating movement. Rather than self-contained depictions of space, one encounters provisional, constantly changes spaces of landscape and life that are held together by the methods of classical painting and drawing. Audio and video are treated as integrative components of painting and collage and fuse on the picture plan into a dense complex of information.