KÄTHE SCHÖNLE

Käthe Schönle, born in 1976 in Riedlingen in southern Germany, studied fine art and visual communication at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, graduating with degrees in painting and illustration. She lives and works in Vienna.

For her, art means transforming materials and exploring the tensions between content, aesthetics, and physicality. Her interest in the hybrid, the ambiguous, and the multilayered permeates her entire oeuvre. Abstraction and figuration often complement each other. In this exhibition, we focus on non-figurative works.

Schönle’s abstract positions reveal and require an overview. They do not dwell on the obvious and superficial. She is concerned with a view of the whole. Influenced, of course, by her own perspectives and feelings.

For Schönle—as for other artists such as Hans Hartung and Gerhard Richter—non-representational images are visualizations of inner states. They arise from an examination of external circumstances. The images represent relationships. They are a dynamic dialogue between colors and layers, shapes and lines, edges and empty spaces. Without any obvious anchor in the concrete world.

There are no clear instructions, no concrete keys to interpreting the images. But there are themes and ideas and associated feelings that serve as starting points. Schönle’s works from the “Formations” series are inspired by the reflections of the French Caribbean philosopher Éduard Glissant, who suggests that identity should be understood in terms of the diversity of relationships and not reduced to (ethnic) origin. What Glissant describes as the “poetics of relationships” is reflected and visualized in Schönle’s abstract painting with its bold colors, clashing forms, overlapping layers of paint, and the resulting dynamism. In her paintings, bold colors collide wildly with powerful energy. This is fitting for Friedrich Nietzsche’s remark: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”