Artist Story: Kerstin Drechsel

Please give a brief introduction to yourself and your artistic practice

When I was 16, I saw an opera production that overwhelmed me. It was staged by Achim Freyer, a famous director, stage and costume designer and visual artist. In my eyes he painted on theatre (in four dimensions). He used the methods of theatre: space, costume, light and being in a timeline. I wanted to study with him, no matter what he was teaching. I thought I could learn about painting and storytelling from him. His professorship was stage design and he had a very small class at the University of the Arts, Berlin. A few years later I became his student for six years. It was really great for me, even though I decided during my studies that my focus would be on fine arts, at that time mainly on painting, but always with an interest in concepts of space.

My personal experiences always have a significant influence on my work. I see them as representing certain common and political concerns of people living in large Western cities, including lesbian and queer life, order-disorder, questioning of roles like motherhood. So, my personal experiences are in a way the (shared) experience of certain groups of people in certain contexts.

The overarching main theme of my work is to question painting and its limitations/borders. With the two-dimensional works, I always want to make the manner of painting/printing explicitly visible, as visible as the subjects depicted, or even more so. The limitations I am questioning concern those of space, of three-dimensionality, but also of the kinds of narratives visualised.

Even as I play with genre subjects like ‘portrait’, ‘nude’, ‘still life/interiors’, I try to open them up by pushing them in a direction that brings a new narrative and perspective to them by including queerness and other non-normative topics that have not often been part of the canon in the visual arts.

Much of your work explores the ways different communities – especially queer communities – express their identities. What drives you to focus on identity?

Identity has been important to me for long time, particularly queer identity. When I started dealing with these themes in my art, it wasn’t very popular. For example, when I referenced porn images to tell my own story about being a queer/lesbian, I got some harsh negative responses to that, but I was not criticised directly for the images but for the way I painted and printed them, a little twisted in my eyes. In recent years, these subjects have become more and more commonplace, even kind of fashionable.

For me, in the mid-nineties, I felt that I wanted to tell something about my own life that at the same time tells something about the lives of many other queer people. I wanted to add queer-feminist life and sexuality to the usual canon of subjects found in fine arts. I felt that these themes were missing from the art canon of the time. Sure, there were feminist positions, especially in the field of performance and video, but I wanted to make a statement in the medium of painting and at the same time reflect on painting as a medium.

Because I’m part of the community that I represent in my paintings, you could say that I have an authentic gaze. But what is an authentic gaze? I’m sceptical about the term because every gaze and every artistic attitude always includes appropriations. I ask friends to participate in my projects. For example, when I developed the ‘zusammen/together’ series I talked to several groups of friends about our relationship with our mothers, it is a more or less hard questioning of the mother role. Or, I asked some queer friends to take part in re-enactment photo sessions in a darkroom, which then became the basis for my series of work ‘If you close the door’.

By making the audience a witness to the private acts in your paintings what are you trying to make them feel/think?

Initially, I don’t think about the viewer/audience when I’m developing a work. I just want to tell something about human life, for example, about a certain queer, lesbian club life, in the ‘If you close the door’ series, that in reality lies between private and public. So, my work always borders on voyeurism, and as a result I question the point/starting point at which a gaze is/becomes a voyeuristic one.

In the ‘In Wärmeland’ series it’s easy to define. There I refer to porn, take the clichés, work with them playfully and criticise them at the same time. Porn is absolutely voyeuristic, made for the camera’s point of view. But it is also clear that it is artificial. In ‘If you close the door’ I tried to place myself within the group – the vantage points don’t always focus on the sexual act (like it does in porn) and the scenes depicted are more casual/incidental.

‘If you close the door’ is about sexual/physical seduction but at the same time about seduction through the painting itself, through the method of painting: very thin oil paint on transparently primed coarse canvas, into which the paint literally penetrates. Here, a sensual encounter is the encounter with painting. To reinforce this, I positioned the small pictures on a shelf, for example, in such a way that the pictures partially covered themselves. This provokes the viewer to want to touch and rearrange them, a haptic stimulus is created, a visual haptic, but also the desire to see what is hidden or invisible.

I see the order-disorder works (RESERVE, UNSER HAUS, MITTELERDE, EXIT) as works in which I deal with very intimate subjects. Perhaps these works are my most intimate works? Full apartments with overwhelming piles of stuff are part of the life of private persons who normally do not invite many people to look on it. That means I'm showing something that really takes place behind closed doors. And here too, the voyeuristic aspect is present. At the same time, I wanted to ‘hook’ the viewers with something that everyone knows: clutter and untidiness. The amount or the way things are arranged is different between subjects and I wanted to provoke questions like: where is the line between acceptable and unacceptable disorder? Is it lazy or an anarchic refusal not to conform to societal norms in how one lives? For me it is very important in these works, that I have an affectionate gaze. I understand the works as portraits, portraits of people whom I know well, without showing them, but by showing the stuff they surround themselves with. Every one of these portraits consists of a pile of many paintings.

These works are conceptual: I see painting as an equivalent to accumulating, a process that is more or less slow and takes time. I paint stacked things, and I adopt the way of piling and collecting by stacking my painted canvases. In the exhibitions I show them either piled or not piled, that’s not so important. It is important that my artistic act is a sort of equivalent to the real hording/piling of stuff. I install the paintings in such a way that the viewer can move between them, therefore, through the installation I reinforce the physical moment that the work can have on the viewer.

In the display cases of the ‘In Wärmeland #2’ series I tried to pull the viewers into the work by using stuff many people know from their childhood: like me, they played with Barbie stuff and Big Jim stuff. In my display cases, I use the stuff to create very different scenes to those that Mattel intended. I give them a sexual charge that I think is already present in the dolls, I just follow what we all thought. This particular work is more loved by women or gay men, I think, because these puppets and doll stuff are within their field of experience.

What makes you choose the groups of people you represent in your work?

I choose the subjects because they enable me to speak about my personal experience and define myself as a queer lesbian and female. I like the play between so-called boyish and girlish/feminine, not fixing a clear direction. So, a lot of my work deals with questioning the norms of femininity or questioning a gender role fixation. As I said before, I struggled to find such subjects in the art canon, ones that express female roles outside of clichéd concepts of femininity.

Is the bigger ‘political’ statement/commentary in your work as important as the ‘personal’ content?

Personal experience and political content cannot be separated in my work. But the language I choose is not the language of politics, but that of art. This is the main difference for me.

I’m a political person, I go to demonstrations, I protest against injustice, but I’m not an activist. Like I said, my language is art. Through my art I try, among other things, to address political issues that have something to do with humanity and non-normative being and thus bring them into a context (art) that is not anchored in (political) everyday life.

The language of art is most exciting for me when it is not explicit, when it allows for ambivalence and multiple readings. It’s never just about a political statement, that would be too basic. It’s always about the language I choose, the methods of painting and installation, and also to create a sensuality without forcing anyone in a specific direction. Quite the opposite, for me the more freedom conveyed through the works, the more spaces for associations open up.

Following on from this, how does feminist theory/history influence your work?

I admire the works of Jack Halberstam, Angela McRobbie, and Donna Haraway, especially their references to popular culture and to sociological issues. I’m not sure if I’m directly influenced by theoretical texts. I see them more as an ‘add on’. Sometimes a single sentence, such as a footnote from Angela McRobbie’s book, Top Girls, can trigger the development of a work for me. It was about a survey of how young women imagine a feminist. I then looked for motifs in my banal everyday life that revolved around feminism and queer femininity in the broadest sense and I painted these with watercolours. This is how the work ‘I love FEMINISM’, came about, a compilation of around 100 sheets that I install in exhibitions like rhizomes in the corners of the rooms.

Historically, art that deals with the ‘erotic’ has been made by male artists objectifying and exploiting female bodies; your work reclaims that territory and uplifts the women involved. What are some of the challenges you have faced when trying to reclaim the creative role from a male dominated field?

Where I clearly refer to porn, such as the ‘In Wärmeland’ series, I examine the core elements of pornography – such as stereotypes, attitudes, the multiple reduction of women’s bodies to the orifices that have become the focus of sex – but I show absurdity of this by making visible the reductive edit and playing with the clichés inherent in the genre. In my depictions, I leave out the men from the source material or change them into women. I paint everything subjectively, in a simple medium: black watercolour paint on cheap paper, that is, the opposite of high end and gloss (as used in porn) and then I ‘spit it out’ again in a print medium (an objectifying medium). Roughly rastered posters and a penny booklet were the result. With that I take the male gaze ad absurdum and tell something, in a rough manner, about a world without men (in which I exclude men).

Are you trying to make a commentary on the stereotypes of women/lesbians/transexuals in your work?

By using these stereotypes in a humorous way, I simultaneously reduce them to absurdity. In other works, such as ‘If you close the door’, I have tried to use as few stereotypes as possible. Stereotypes always have a great deal of artificiality and rigidity. With this series I wanted to focus more on the ‘natural’, if you can even call it that. And not only in the images, but also through the (rather casual and sensual) way of painting, which I have described previously.

With more recent work, I'm trying to bring empowerment into it. For example, the ‘E-Werk/power station’ series is a motivational ride through queer feminist history. You can see mother temples, breasts like megaphones or vice versa, Neanderthal women swinging clubs, etc. The image grounds are three-dimensional hybrids that can be read between ‘power distribution boxes’ and furniture. They are connected to each other by soft fabric tubes. Through this I let the boxes become kinds of bodies. In this work, I address fewer ethical problems, rather I am trying to address (and also strengthen) the network, the merger, the collective power.

What do you see as the ‘deeper meaning’ or narrative in your work?

In terms of subject matter, I’m always concerned with people, human existence and the entanglements in different contexts. I would like the viewer to be involved in the work, to latch onto points where they feel reminded of something from their own lives. For me, it is ideal when a connection is created between my work and the viewer, which at the same time means creating an opening into the viewer’s own associations. The viewer complements and completes the work. This is most evident in the ‘tablework’ of the work ‘zusammen/together’, which involves mother-daughter relationships. In the physical exhibitions, people then begin to talk about their own relationships to their mothers. This is almost a participatory moment of the work.

Outside of the queer genre of your work, what themes do you feel are the most important to you?

What is decisive in my work is always the questioning of normative assumptions, such as questioning the role of mother, order and disorder, femininity, etc. But what is most important to me is the examination and formal language of the media I use, painting and installation, in connection with the narrative. How is something I represent painted, printed, built in detail? What shape does the image ground have? Why? This inseparable unity of narrative and form, or the mutual strengthening, is different with each series and thus always a new challenge and surprise, for both myself and for the viewer.

Do you have any particular memories of your experience of working with Vane?

Working with Vane has given my work international visibility, both in the UK, USA, Spain, and Portugal. On a personal level, the cooperation was always very collegial. Vane directors Paul and Chris have even shown themselves open to projects that may not be as lucrative for galleries financially but show their international network. For example, in 2011 they agreed to put on an exhibition for 22 painting students from Kassel, for which I was responsible for as a visiting professor, which the students titled ‘Yummikraut’. We papered the entire gallery with the wallpaper work of one student. The wallpaper work was like a primer for the work of all other exhibitors. In this context, Paul and Chris then invited the whole group to visit their prospective new space in the centre of Newcastle and a group of artists cooked especially for us. It was a great exchange between cultural workers from Newcastle through many generations and the young students from Kassel. For the students there were also contacts established by Vane with both art schools in Newcastle.

During my two solo exhibitions at Vane, I got to know artists from the Newcastle area, some of whom I am still in contact with today. Vane has also enabled me to do consultations with individual students as a visiting artist at Newcastle University. I have found the arts and culture scene in Newcastle and Gateshead to be very open, lively, and communicative and I think Vane is an important part of all of that.