GABRIELE SCHNITZENBAUMER

Gabriele Schnitzenbaumer works in Germany, America and Seychelles, creating (principally) sculpture and paintings. Her work carries a surreal quality, with impossible dream-like images and structures which defy the rules of physical reality. Human forms are constantly present, alongside strange and blotched alien landscapes and fantastic and bizarre animal imagery.

The artist has compared her methodology to the Rorschach test, a psychological procedure in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analysed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. When working in Seychelles the artist tends to focus upon painting, and she says this about her process: “My painting process starts more or less like a wild orgy or frenzy of uncontrolled paint explosions all over the canvas, and then I try to gain control. I start searching for a story and for figures evolving out of the colour patches, continuously adding, eliminating and evolving until I know ‘now it is perfect’ and the story is ready to be told.”

She often uses materials such as clay, iron, ready-made wheels, tools and implements and wood, fashioning hybrid forms with long arms, rakish hands, and exaggerated bodies, synthesising the corporeal and the manmade in a manner that suggests mythology and devotional objects. Her work often focuses on women, a subject that has been described in her work as “commentary on matriarchy as a kind of secular religion.”