Stéphanie Baechler (°1983, Meyriez, CH) lives and works in Amsterdam and Bern, in Switzerland. She has exhibited at MAHF, Fribourg, Chamber Gallery New York, Kunsthalle Fri Art Fribourg, Kunsthaus Centre d’art Pasquart Biel, Sankt Gallen in Switzerland, Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam and Mode Museum Antwerpen, among others. Her works are in public and private collections such as HEAD Geneva, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich and MAHF Fribourg.
This is the first exhibition of her work in the gallery in Brussels. Baechler is interested in the interplay between craft and technology; the complex and often ambiguous relationship between handmade and machine-made results. Textile and clay are the main materials she uses in her sculptures and installations. Her work is characterised by a sensitive, intuitive and process-oriented approach to materials. During the past summer months, she showed an impressive installation at the Tröckneturm (drying tower) in Sankt Gallen, Switzerland. She also created a book – historically documented – for this event, together with publisher Rudy Guedj of Building Fictions. The works in this exhibition are inspired by and build on this installation.
Joke Hansen (b 1979, Bilzen, BE) lives in Bilzen and works in Hasselt. Her work has been exhibited at Kunsthalle Recklinghausen in Germany, Z33 in Hasselt and SMAK in Ghent, among others.
This is the first show of her work in the gallery in Brussels. Hansen plays with strange shapes and cut-outs in her wooden panels and ‘shaped canvases’. Sometimes she also paints these shapes on a photograph of a landscape. They imply an extra dimension, a portal to another world or the next level. Each new work clashes with a delicate balance between resolving unpleasant compositional tensions and finding just enough interesting friction. She herself often describes the dancing holes, tubes and tunnels in her works as escape routes. For a year now, she has also been making sculptures that hang on the wall. The elements spaced out in her larger works are assembled and balled into sculptural volumes, which play equally with layers and perspective; less from an essential reduction and more from a mass; not in paint, but in a third dimension. Neither finding nor stacking these elements is done strategically. Everything is intuitive and spontaneous.