Sabine Dehnel

Fanny, 2013

C-print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag ultra Smooth paper with a strip of colored foil, embroidered by hand by the artist, with signed book Sheet size 42,00 x 59,50 cm Image size 31,50 x 42,00 cm Signed and numbered Limited edition of 15 + 3 AP


For the viewer, Sabine Dehnel’s images are a baffling, not easily decoded dialogue between painting and staged photography, source and reproduction, reality and fiction. The artist uses found photographs as the basis for her paintings, and models installations after her own paintings, only to once again photograph them—a multilayered process of transformation. In addition she builds her own sets for her staged photographs, and does the make-up for her models. “What I practice in this constant back-and-forth between media features parallels to the process of recollection,” says Dehnel herself. “I’m interested in a new sort of illustration—in overwriting memories. I feel it’s a better, more redeeming idea that a painting can mentally be given a new framework and thus be embedded differently in history.” The focus of Dehnel’s work is on the human body, usually the female body, even if it only appears as a fragment.
 
This is also the case in her series Playground, from which the artist has selected a charming motif for our Edition: Fanny, enveloped in a mesh of colorful playing field markings in a gymnasium. “Thanks to the triple overwriting process used for the paintings, the lines have suddenly peeled away from the floor, and they were stretched across the studio space for the staged photograph,” Dehnel explains. In a C-print made especially for the Edition on top-quality Hahnemühle art paper, one of these lines is accentuated by shiny foil hand-embroidered by the artist.