ANY LIKENESS IS FICTITIOUS—on the work of Sabine Dehnel

For Sabine Dehnel, the wish to be a painter, body and soul, never meant loosing her head. Her work is conceptual and includes photography and installations. Even most recent art history shows how photography and painting compete. Their respective possibilities are not only played-out, but mutually followed and pursued. From the start of photo-technique practices, painters, more or less, admittedly and strategically avail themselves this material, particularly in gathering images.

Today, the battle concerning the hyper-reality of photographic images versus the subjects which they portray is legitimised in a new wave of painting. Is this discussion now obsolete - in view of the considerable availability of digitally conceived pictures processed without restraint and not to be ignored? Sabine Dehnel takes a look back. Painting and photography stand side by side as equals, but prove to be, a kind of mimicry, dependent on each other.
She searches, as well, for subjects in found photographs and weaves an extensive archive from childhood holiday snapshots taken by her father in the 1970s. The starting point. She appropriates this, her own material and entirely foreign material with relish and painterly investigation. To rouse memory, to bring back to life what was fixed in a moment - the moment the camera clicks, with the intention to hold on to something that’s leaving? Or, sceptically, to make sure that it's never been so?

The artist selects, respectively, just one cut-out from the collection, which she tends to widen on large canvases. Thus, she can break open, on the one hand, a stiff surface with color and ornament, painting's trump card, increase sensuous material quality referencing the abstraction, and build up narrative tension on the other hand. As she pulls up the figures by close inspection, drawing out banality and identity through the initial slices. Now concealed feelings and relations can be implemented. This is not about mimesis, rather fiction.
Five years ago, during her studies in Los Angeles, Sabine Dehnel intensified her work with photography and began again, to transmit her paintings to photos.
For her this means, foremost, installation, rather than reproduction. Does she want to return painting to reality? Or is this perhaps a theatrical act?

The artist builds scenery extravagantly, looks for clothes which resemble the painted ones or she crafts them in an artistic application. These textiles are more than costumes; they can be seen as indicators. This fabric leaves it possible to pull the painting off the surface into reality, as it were, to turn on and back into itself.
Sabine Dehnel stores her props carefully in a requisite pool.
She searches for models, allows herself to cover them in garments and places them as they are placed in the painted composition. She paints their bodies with make up in an effort to match the coloring of the painted figures. This works partly as camouflage, for example, in the series “Dazwischen I-VII” (“In Between I-VII”, 2005). The series “Campingstuhl I-IX” (“Camping Chair I-IX”, 2002) gets us partially in its clutches when painted-in shadows become, suddenly uncanny. The Artist cannot stay outside the scene as a Director, but steps into the role of culprit. Not only because she transforms allegedly clear pictures into fictional scenes, but because she exposes and files a report on the fact that taking photos is not an act in neutral picture making. The photographers have their way with the photographed, leading to abuse and manipulation. Sabine Dehnel's models may operate only on instruction.

The photos which result from such stagings look like painting indeed, however, are not to be mistaken as such. One can regard it as a confusing game, an instructional show or comedy. It is all of these. In this manner, the artist can follow the relationship to reality in the presentations, and, above all, clarify medium and perspective in the process of picture making.

Sabine Dehnel uses her arrangements not only to produce a single photographic print. She creates sequences that put you on a time reel. However, we are not forging ahead here with expected activities. The models each take the same posture in this working series. Slight displacements are barely noticed – as if the trigger is pulled in brief sequence. There's redecorating, however, between these short-takes: The folding chair where a naked young woman sits (in all nine photos of the same-named series) has its own colors and patterns in each frame. Nevertheless, the model is forced again, to take that same posture. The series “Rock I-VIII” (“Skirt I-VIII”, 2002) steers attention to the cut, color and decor of various garments as meaningful, weight-bearing components at the picture's core - the female figure in contrast remains fragmentary. In the row of images entitled “Dazwischen” ("In between"), foregrounds and backgrounds are exchanged and positioned in such a way that one never completely recognizes the photographed profile of a girl's face.
The picture moves – take after take – from relative realism to a vaguely aesthetic whole enriched through association. In contrast: “Grüner Salon I-IX” (“Green Salon I-IX”, 2004), a pair is animated by the wave decoration of a curtain in an ever wilder dance. Seated torsos without heads are portrayed in the preceding painting of 2002. The photos turn out more inventive than the paintings in this group of work.

Even in the early years of photography-history, there are attempts to adjust painting through the detours "of living pictures" and make blueprints.
If Sabine Dehnel urges photography to imitate painting today, she does so knowingly inspiring the paradoxical reverse. She puts herself in the position to probe the artistic process of production and reception and shifts our view from certain dependencies and mechanisms, whose validity and power is not lost in new media, and not limited to the field of art.
// Text by, Sigrun Hellmich // Translation from the German by, Rachel Kaplan