Press Release

Susanne Kühn + Inessa Hansch
FRAC Alsace, September 2018 – January 2019

The German artist Susanne Kühn (Freiburg/Nuremberg) and the Belgian architect Inessa Hansch (Paris) jointly realize objects that combine painting and spatial construction. In their first institutional exhibition in France, these collaborative pieces are shown alongside works of their individual artistic practice.

Inessa Hansch’s object-like structures enable the three-dimensional representation of Susanne Kühn’s paintings. Their architecture is occupied with the idea of “interiority”, i.e. the creation of a defined and recognizable, controlled as well as controlling environment capable of generating awareness for the site. By determining the setting for Kühn’s paintings, Hansch’s constructions establish a connection between interior and exterior. In that way, the simultaneity of the different measuring scales forms the framework that allows viewers to inscribe themselves into the pictorial space.

Susanne Kühn’s paintings, which are created in response to Inessa Hansch’s wood structures, react dynamically to the structures’ architectural qualities: interior and exterior, light and shadow, texture and scaling. Thus, in dialogue with Hansch’s spatial construction, Kühn creates an illusionistic pictorial world. In doing so, she investigates the significance of the human figure both for the pictorial world and for architecture and explores the possibilities of painting free of two-dimensional constraints.

A catalogue with texts by Gilles Tiberghien (philosopher, Université Paris 1) and Felizitas Diering, director of FRAC Alsace, will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. (Design Studio Vier5, published by FRAC and les presses du réel)