Kerstin Brätsch: Die Sein—Para Psychics

Over the past 20 years, Berlin- and New York–based painter Kerstin Brätsch has developed a distinctive way of working with which she continually expands the medium of painting, redefining and interpreting it time and again by including performances, artistic interventions, and installations. Besides her regular collaboration with other artists such as Adele Röder (DAS INSTITUT), Debo Eilers (KAYA) and Ei & Tomoo Arakawa (UNITED BROTHERS), she also draws on traditional artisanal techniques, some of which have been forgotten, in order to reveal painting’s metaphysical and animistic qualities in a humorous manner.

Para Psychics, her most recent series, continues this exploration, albeit in a modified form. During the first Covid-19 lockdown in New York, Brätsch transposed her large-scale and collaborative practice into an inward-looking process of drawing on a daily basis. In the period between January 2020 and March 2022, she created one hundred Mandala-like drawings in a time in which she intensively pursued mysticism, tarot, plant medicine, and deities like the Sumerian sky goddess Inanna. Die Sein: Para Psychics at the Ludwig Forum Aachen presents all one hundred drawings from this series for the first time in a site-specific installation of transparent spatial structures, juxtaposed against tinted window panes which manipulate the sunlight, creating a unique atmosphere for the viewer. Her exploration of painting in relation to the body, be it the social, physical or psychic, is continued in the drawings as a journey into the mental body. Distributed across the museum walls and metal structures, the drawings evoke abstracted fortune-telling, laid out in a way that visitors can interpret and wander through them.

The title of the series references older works by Brätsch, the so-called Psychics (2005–2008), for which she sought out countless fortune tellers in New York. The results of the sessions ultimately provided the starting point for numerous oil paintings—painted, provisional truths that range ambiguously between irony and authenticity. In series like the Psychics, the subsequent Unstable Talismanic Renderings (since 2014), the Blocked Radiants (2011), or the Fossil Psychics (Stucco Marmo) (since 2017), however, it was the materiality of the works themselves or the associated production processes that opened up links to questions of animism in painting: by building images out of drops (marblings), by sculpted brushstrokes that seem fossilized (stuccos), and through the constant multiplication of her own artistic identity, including old handcrafts and their masters (or in the case of the Psychics, by painting abstract portraits after actual sessions with psychics). After many years of collaborating with artists and craftspeople, Brätsch, however, is inverting this collaborative impetus with the Para Psychics. She no longer generates the means for exploring alternative spheres, temporalities, and personalities by including others or by adopting centuries-old processes, but rather (triggered by her own isolation caused by the lockdown) via/para the multiplicity of her self. The drawings, made using the simplest, readily accessible materials like colored pencils and paper, thus constitute personal concretions of the involuntary pausing during the pandemic. In their formal reference to divination cards, however, they also open up a constant transitionary process of seeing and being. Die Sein is a derivative of the German term “Da Sein”—to be there, to exist, substituting the female “Die/she” for “Da/there.” It refers in addition to the change that the series of drawings represents in Brätsch’s artistic working method: she stresses a personalized, feminized “being there,” where her own mutability, complexity, and multiplicity shifts to the role held by collaborations.

With a sound sphere composed by Wibke Tiarks.

Curated by Eva Birkenstock

In parallel with the exhibition, the artist book Para Psychics, edited by Bettina Funcke, will be published by Ludwig Forum Aachen and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. With contributions by Báyò Akómoláfé, Eva Birkenstock, Kerstin Brätsch, CAConrad, Bettina Funcke, Donna Haraway, Inanna, Lucretius, Kerstin Stakemeier, Zoe Stillpass, Merlin Sheldrake, and Michael Taussig. On the occasion of its release, we invite you to a guided tour with Kerstin Brätsch, Kerstin Stakemeier (Professor for Art Theory and Mediation, Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg), and Eva Birkenstock on Saturday, September 24, 2022, at 11am.