Sabine Hertig
Sabine Hertig has been maintaining an offensive relationship with all information media for years. For Hertig, collage is more than just a techno-media instrument, but a tool for reflecting on a world that has itself become a montage of information. For Hertig, collage, as a form of painting, thinking and acting, creates environments, capable of questioning human processes and models of action.
This is why she has been making monumental collages for a long time, the “Landscapes”, as Hertig calls this series of works. The clear compositions, the use of light and the deep perspective immediately bring painting to mind. However, a closer look reveals cosmoses of images rich in detail, in which countless individual stories are pictorially condensed in a flood of opulent images:
“(…) One can say that the monumental collages are born of a pictorial attitude, in the sense that I first check the tonal value of each image fragment. In the initial phase, I do not pay attention to the visible motif on the image fragment, but I try to observe it in a non-figurative way, as if it were a spot of color. There follows a long temporal path based on action and reaction. (…) [I] emphasize a final image that appears at the end of the process: a spatial collage at a distance that is closed in on itself (…) It's about landscapes, it's about the inside and the outside (…) To that extent, this moment in which one seems to get 'lost' and the sharpening of the gaze at a distance that is linked to it (…) play a role for me as an artist in the making. This can also be transmitted to the other during the contemplation of the work.”
* Quoted in: “Sabine Hertig im Gespräch mit Ines Goldbach” / Sabine Hertig - Scrap / 2018
In the latest Landscapes, Hertig also intervenes in the collages with sandpaper, so that sometimes a total erasure of certain image contents results. The “skin of the content” of the collaged picture elements is stripped away. This sanding results in the edges of the images in the lower layers of the collage revealing themselves as traces, and highlighting the creative process.
The most recent collages thus come closer and closer to gestural drawing. In “Landscapes”, body-like forms form a large whole through a drawing-like gesture. In the series “Bodies”, the environment finally appears empty and the parts of the image accumulate into a human-like body.
Hertig continues his work on the cycles “windows”, “reflections” and “mirrors”. Mirrors both reveal and deceive, promise and dismantle. However, here they do not serve as reflectors or images, but as virtual breaking points between interior and exterior spaces. Unlike these 'screens' at the final moment before implosion, the breakthrough in the 'windows' is already underway. We are confronted here with states of exception of porous interior worlds, constantly penetrated by the exterior - worlds as tentacular as intimate, in which it is a question of immersing oneself.
More information : www.sabinehertig.ch
