exhibited:
20.03.–20.05.2026 Gelingen. Gelingen, curated by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Vienna, AT

Since 2024, Sarah Bechter has been developing a new technique alongside her classical practice of oil painting on stretched canvas. In this process, she partially stains the fabric of an unstretched canvas with ink in a deliberately uncontrolled manner, allowing chance-driven patterns to emerge. The canvas is then stretched and further worked with loose pigment, which Bechter distributes across the surface using her fingers.
Only in a subsequent step does she begin the painterly elaboration with brush and oil paint. Here, Bechter often gently draws out female-coded forms from the underlying layers, endowing fields and patches of color with suggestions of faces and body fragments.
This practice originated during her residency at CCA Andratx and was further developed during her time at ISCP in New York. It reflects a mobile understanding of the studio—one that is not bound to the full material setup of a fixed workspace. At the same time, her playful engagement with chance and association recalls the artistic strategies and experimental games of Surrealism.