we miss you

A lightness of touch disguises the hard-nosed humour in the work of Paula Förster. Employing arange of painterly approaches, her works on canvas, dry wall and photographs wryly combine tropes of youth and the everyday with elements borrowed from the archives of art history thus speaking simultaneously of personal experiences and more impersonal spans of time. A series of small oil washes on canvas depict intimate snapshots of domestic spaces that appear at once familiar and out of time. A certain self-conscious naïveté induced by loose brush strokes and a palette reminiscent of childhood is undercut by the dry lack of romanticism in their framing. For example, in a small bathroom a shower curtain sprinkled with butterflies hangs in close proximity to a toilet while in another painting the corner of an unlit room contrasts with the illumination of a bathroom. One can detect a similarly austere humour in the decision to foreground a horse’s ass in sun (2020), surrounded only by flowers and on a monochrome background. The work responds to Paolo Uccello’s La Battaglia di San Romano (1438), in which riders become lost in an indistinct sea of armour, while a horse’s muscular buttocks looms resolutely at centre stage. Based on the same painting, rerun (2020) shows three seemingly floating figures on horseback, adrift in a loose, transparent wash of empty space. The glory of battle has been similarly drained out of the warriors and instead these figures become something closer to figurines, toys unceremoniously abandoned on a nursery floor. In a new series, Förster employs techniques of collage to incorporate photographs taken on her phone. Glued onto dry wall they undergo a process of merging with the brittle surface of pigmented plaster while still retaining their ‘otherness’. The works share a sense of loneliness and thereby draw attention to the night-time as a non-structural, temporal space.

Fabian Schöneich