Sophie Gogl

Sophie Gogl operates on various pictorial levels as a painter. The canvas serves as her primary pictorial space, but in extending how she approaches certain pictorial fragments she continually incorporates objects and installations. Various aspects of youth and popular culture serves as the basis for her exhibition Die knusprige Nichte (1). Gogl draws from digital and personal image materials to create an associatively ordered narrative system that is presented in a variety of formulated ways. Her new paintings combine serial formal decisions, including selecting a specific color palette, with images from her personal archive or digital media. For instance, a series of memories of a specific parking lot as a compelling non-place, painted in watercolor on acrylic, is combined with bathroom selfies and a portrait of the American actress Dakota Johnson. In other works, she extends the painterly space to formats of exhibiting per se, e.g. when painting exhibition walls in a diamond pattern that evokes a variety of associations: a harlequin, shopping for the first time at New Yorker, or her first Vans she wore out to the point of decay. In this sense, Sophie Gogl’s works are based on a linking of her own experiences of growing up to visual cultures and how they appear in media and art. Gogl makes use of ostensibly trivial themes, combining wistfully colored elements with flashes of cynical commentaries in a fragile narrative that addresses both simple sensitivities as well as encrusted social structures.

An interview with Sophie Gogl and Melanie Ohnemus will accompany the exhibition.

(1) Translates to "the scrumptious niece". Denotation of a fictional character in: Zweig, Stefan. Ungeduld des Herzens. Stockholm/Amsterdam: Bermann-Fischer/Allert de Lange, 1939.