Archipelago

The HOLLEREI Gallery is pleased to announce "Archipelago" as the artist's first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Käthe Schönle's work is formally compelling through a powerful, highly reduced drawn figuration, which is further charged on paper and canvas works in interplay with a gestural painting. Schönle's interest lies in a critical engagement and sensitive observation of human existence, the questioning of structures and relationship networks in both personal and societal contexts. From this emerge narrations and visual worlds beyond pathos that skilfully depict the fragile balance of human existence.

In her current works, Schönle devotes herself more than before to an abstract and material painting, used to explore new possibilities and to let freer spaces of association emerge through open pictorial systems. The empathetic thinking about relationships and emotions known from the artist thereby enters a new level, through which the works, beyond the representable, become their own realities that reflect both a painterly and an intellectual process.

In this most recent series of works, Schönle refers in a poetic-associative manner to the French writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, for whose thinking the history and landscape of the Antillean archipelago provides the starting point. The archipelago becomes a kind of thought model for the diversity of identities and relationship networks, whose interplay and further development can lead to a (supposedly utopian?) society that is characterised not by a homogenising globalisation based on the lowest common denominator, but by a decentrally developing network of relationships from different traditions and perspectives.