Sarah Loibl: F I R S T

About

Daniel Marzona is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Sarah Loibl (*1987 in Munich) with new works.

Sarah Loibl’s pictures address in a multifaceted way the interlocking among corporeality, movement, and space.
What she works out in front of the model and places in her Konvolut Möglichkeiten (bundle of possibilities) captures gestures, poses, and movements of the human body on tracing paper, without freezing it. The fluidity of the painting materials she uses corresponds to the ephemerality of the happenings layered in allusions and as traces on the rolls of paper.

This image memory, with which, as an unorganized pile of loose sheets on a rolling table, Loibl once nonchalantly accompanied her wall-oriented works in an exhibition room, is used in two ways and reworked. First, the material on tracing paper serves the development of collages, montages, and layerings in which fragments of individual sheets are juxtaposed, so that imaginary pictorial spaces arise in which corporeality is released from the laws of gravity, up and down can no longer be distinguished, and the simultaneity of opposite movements always appears possible.

Second, transposed into real space, individual motifs from those brought together in Loibl’s collages confront us again in monumental pictures measuring up to 360 x 260 cm, presented on transparent gauze. The verve and dynamism of the movement that characterize her preparatory drawings are not lost in the large-format pictures. And yet, the four pictures that lean against the wall and tower over the viewer, together forming the work Vier Möglichkeiten gegen eine Wand zu rennen (four possibilities of running against a wall), demand a change in the viewer’s attitude. A certain mental mobility that makes it possible to follow the sometimes disparate fragments of bodily movement in the collaged paintings is here as if presumed and enabled. But without a minimum of bodily activity on the part of the viewer, they cannot be adequately grasped in their complexity. They want to be walked around, and they produce a relationship among room, picture, and viewer that constantly changes, depending on the viewer’s standpoint. Depending on the incidence of the light and the position, the shadows cast on the opaque zones of the pictures on the wall also change. These pictures’ drastic shift in scale evokes an almost stage-like theatricality, without overwhelming us with sublimity. They simply bring together the painting’s scope of action and the real space in which the painting is perceived, thereby complexly relating the viewer’s corporeality to the fragmented corporeality of what is depicted.

Along with everything else, Sarah Loibl wants to keep her works open, to resist the dictate of masterly production, and instead to emphasize the process of making as movement and shifting and the process of perception. This may be shown in the fact that three of the large-format pictures can equally worthily be shown as a stack leaning against the wall. Arranged in this way, they produce an abstraction that nonetheless points to traces of motion and makes a dynamic pictorial activity palpable. And that would then remain only one of three possibilities of simultaneously running against three walls.