ausgestellt:

22.05.-12.07.2025 SARAH BECHTER Jostle, Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Vienna, AT



While “jostle” conveys a sense of overabundance, the figurative paintings are characterized by a dual emptiness. The figures do not assert themselves within a densely populated pictorial space but rather against a backdrop in which they threaten to dissapear. Moreover, in some areas of the composition painted in pigment, ink, and oil paint, the canvas emerges, shifting the focus from subject matter to painterly technique. … Sarah Bechter’s painting is self-aware, …. The ambivalence between figure and ground, between actor and backdrop, between subject and social context, is not only characteristic of Sarah Bechter’s painterly idiom, but also points to the feminist stance articulated through it. The corporeality of the androgynous beings is contained entirely in the painterly gesture that brings them forth—namely, the brushstrokes from which they are constructed. Sinewy, semi-transparent figures who are neither granted to recede behind illusionism nor to dissolve into abstraction. (Leonie Huber, abstract from the exhibition text for ‘Jostle’, 05.2025)