Sarah Bogner & Onka Allmayer–Beck

PINK IS LIKE RED BUT NOT QUITE

Sarah Bogner and Onka Allmayer-Beck exhibit artworks from the last two years under the title Pink is like red but not quite. The two artists work in different media – painting and ceramics, respectively. They have different premises and backgrounds, and have only known about each other recently. Nevertheless, it is possible to see loose connections between their paintings and objects, and it is not difficult to find them.

Sarah Bogner’s paintings are based on a reduced repertoire of forms that the artist constantly alters and develops. Her subjects or rather signs, which are extremely flat on the canvas with egg tempera and ink, are pink horses and other species such as a kind of Halloween jack-o’-lantern with a hat. These demonstratively good-humored, almost little silly creatures are organized individually or as organically intergrown groups on the surface. They are as close to classical modernism as they are to comics and cartoons. The painting “Marilyn” (2021), for example, shows that horses are also capable of smoking in a casual way.

Bogner’s works play with character configurations and image details, with surfaces and light, and also with perspectives and lines of sight. While most of the works offensively look for contact with the outside, the communication in “Vier Blasse Grazien” (Four Pale Graces) and “Vier Grazien Gotik” (Four Graces Gothic) (both 2021) takes place within the boundaries of the image. Bogner’s creatures are hybrids in their mixtures with other species as well as in their oscillation between figuration and abstraction. Clear, silhouette-like forms meet the dissolution of contours, plan meets chance, cutout means meet the effects of watercolor painting. In the process, color shows itself in the most diverse aggregate states, generating gradients and cloud-like formations.

The ceramics of Onka Allmayer-Beck are also characterized by anthropomorphizing moments and hybridity. In a programmatically vague way, they move somewhere between architectures, vessels, plants, and monster-like entities. The organic is as inherent to them as the mechanical; similar to the figures and objects of a plasticine film, they seem to be in constant motion and metamorphosis. Blow instrument and tentacled creature come together in “No.130 -Trompeten Krake ( Trumpet Octopus)”. “No.128- Hohes Haus (High House)” is both a building and an arthropod. “No.138” plays with the visual language of roots, while “No.135 (Ukraine)” (all 2021) is related to drain pipes. Their condition would probably be different today if their form had not been preserved in the kiln. 

Allmayer-Beck, a graduate fashion designer and illustrator, also sees her ceramics as useful objects. But even though they can be used to store things, as candlesticks or otherwise, they offer some resistance to the language of well-formed design. The surfaces and contours are uneven, dented and charmingly distorted. Imperfection is their greatest asset. But the glaze – predominantly skin tones, mustard and curry colors – also gives them the appeal of a highly polished product.

The “But not quite” in the title applies, although in different ways, to the works of both artists. It can be heard in the exhibition like a refrain: as a rather soft but cheerful melody.

Esther Buss