Artists

Susanne Pittroff

Press release

With “Traces” by Susanne Pittroff, Galerie Françoise Heitsch invites visitors on a search for traces at the beginning of the year. The exhibition brings together new works by the Munich-based artist, many of which were created last year and pursue the theme of “traces” in a multi-layered way.

“Projektionen” is the title of the large-format fabric works made of earth-colored silk that nestle against the gallery walls. Dark shapes can be seen on the thin silk fabrics in camouflage tones, whose gradients are reminiscent of country maps, then again of plants or oversized splashes of color. We also encounter the same shapes in a neighboring series of ink works on paper, where the geographical and topographical references are even more prominent. Black shapes that look as if they have been removed from a map and transferred to white paper. Susanne Pittroff lays silver or copper-colored grids over them, reminiscent of degree networks on maps or graph paper.

The artist has taken the same shapes from her works on paper and projected them onto 145 x 200 centimeters of silk fabric, where they are again executed in ink. The title of the fabric works is thus also an expression of her production method. As the ink is absorbed and drained in different ways, the projected forms change depending on the painting surface, and there is always a slight shift. The grid structure from the drawings is also subtly echoed in the folding of the silk fabrics. Susanne Pittroff's works thus leave traces in each other in the truest sense of the word. And viewers can follow these traces through the exhibition without ever encountering an exact copy.

However, “Traces” also refers to the content of the works. The references to cartography seem like a topographical tracing, like the artistic surveying of an unknown place. The grid that the artist places over the forms in order to seemingly locate them in a coordinate system turns out to be a subsequent insertion and thus exposes this attempt at classification as fiction; a reference to the nature of demarcations and the determination of periphery and center as a purely human construct. Susanne Pittroff's structures, on the other hand, are fluid constellations. Without the use of a contour pencil to prevent the colors from running out, they always take on slightly different forms from picture to picture, which are beyond the artist's control. Accordingly, the works can also be read as a commentary on the current geopolitical shifts as well as the shifts in what can be said and thought, and as an attempt to translate the currently prevailing volatile, uncertain feeling of our time into an artistic language.