PARADE
Sarah Bogner has created two paintings especially and accurately tailored for the MQ Art Box. Playfully rotated, the huge “Parade I” and “Parade II,” measuring each 90.5 × 236.2 inches, break free from any plain frontal view, while the sceneries are kept in a proper limbo. It remains uncertain whether we are seeing landscapes, peering into caves or looking at the backdrops of a stage.
The painterly performance is certainly theatrical. With great sentiment, in swaying arcs as well as abrupt leaps Bogner puts everything onto the canvas. The up and down, to and against, faltering, swirling and flowing she places in a delicate equilibrium. All is encapsulated and densely interwoven by this ornamental pictorial rhythm. (Whereas the perspectives and viewpoints multiply tremendously.)
Bogner’s colors are delicate. At times statuesque in gray grisaille, at times transparent in cheeky pink and lemon yellow, at times revelling in brown and gold hues. The two paintings appear like complementary friezes. A bright one, a dark one. A light one, a grave one. A brisk one, a gentle one. Opposites like day and night. In this, she achieves an immediacy of expression that shuns neither seriousness nor wit. As the images are indeed funny.
And that’s due to Bogner’s protagonists. Which are, as Maya Oehlen correctly put it, “no Lippizzans,” but horses nonetheless. With a wink, they step up, stride out, romp around carefree. Accompanied only by some ‘friends’ who grow about like extra extremities or peek onto the scene from the sides.
The absurd atmospheric change between monumental grandezza and graceful intimacy is as beguiling as flowing Botticelli hair or the radiant splendor of the joyous dance of bodies, colors, and planes Sarah Bogner unfolds just as lightly as Matisse in his second “Dance” (1932) from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
Christian Malycha
(translated by Alexander Serner)
Sarah Bogner was born in 1980 in Munich, Germany. She studied Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich as well as Computer Music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Together with Josef Zekoff, she founded Harpune Verlag in 2010, an independent publishing house specialized in artist book and hand-printed editions. She has been part of numerous solo and group exhibitions in China, Europe and the USA. Sarah Bogner lives in Vienna.