Installation view of Sascha Braunig: Shivers at MoMA PS1, October 23 2016 – March 5, 2017. Photo: Pablo Enriquez, courtesy the artist and MoMA PS1.
MoMA PS1 presents an intimate exhibition of works by Canadian artist Sascha Braunig, on view through March 5, 2017. The artist’s first solo museum exhibition, Sascha Braunig: Shivers showcases Braunig’s unique approach to studio portraiture across 24 works created in the last five years.
Beginning with meticulously rendered paintings of fantastical sculptural constructions, the artist deploys a range of pictorial techniques to depict bodies under duress. The figures in her work are compressed by their environments, stretched and twisted across armatures, and often overwhelmed by their surroundings. Some are irradiated by industrial light, sutured into uncomfortable hybrids, and hollowed out.
Drawing inspiration from the distorted bodies that litter the histories of modern painting, Braunig adapts these legacies to the discomforts and instabilities of contemporary life. In more recent works, Braunig’s figures seem to turn on themselves, testing their own limits and those of the settings that confine them. While evocatively dystopic, her paintings also subtly empower their vulnerable subjects, advocating a humanist art for an age in which individual experience seems threatened by forces beyond our control.
Sascha Braunig: Shivers is organized by Peter Eleey, Curator and Associate Director of Exhibitions and Programs, MoMA PS1.
Sascha Braunig (b. 1983, Canada) received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2008. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; the New Museum, New York; and the Baltimore Museum of Art Braunig lives and works in Portland, Maine.
Beginning with meticulously rendered paintings of fantastical sculptural constructions, the artist deploys a range of pictorial techniques to depict bodies under duress. The figures in her work are compressed by their environments, stretched and twisted across armatures, and often overwhelmed by their surroundings. Some are irradiated by industrial light, sutured into uncomfortable hybrids, and hollowed out.
Drawing inspiration from the distorted bodies that litter the histories of modern painting, Braunig adapts these legacies to the discomforts and instabilities of contemporary life. In more recent works, Braunig’s figures seem to turn on themselves, testing their own limits and those of the settings that confine them. While evocatively dystopic, her paintings also subtly empower their vulnerable subjects, advocating a humanist art for an age in which individual experience seems threatened by forces beyond our control.
Sascha Braunig: Shivers is organized by Peter Eleey, Curator and Associate Director of Exhibitions and Programs, MoMA PS1.
Sascha Braunig (b. 1983, Canada) received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2008. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; the New Museum, New York; and the Baltimore Museum of Art Braunig lives and works in Portland, Maine.
