‘Our sculptures encapsulate a body and they show its sensitivity’
(Sara Enrico and Sophie Hirsch, New York, 2018)
After being invited to stage this two-women exhibition, the two artists met for the first time in New York and began an exciting exchange of ideas. The two artists share an interest in studying the human body transversally in relation to its spatial extension, its statics, its dynamics and its surface. Starting from the premises of the body seen as an architectural structure and as a singular measure and entity, both artists look for the factors that transform it stabilize it and, contrariwise, strain it. What happens when a body loses its balance? In that instant, compensation strategies, reparatory movements are set off which alter its original form. The prime subject of the conversation between the two artists, the body seen as a playful, flexible, dynamic entity in relation to an idea of precariousness. Sara Enrico’s work, based on analysis of the potentialities of surfaces and materials as alchemical narrative units, involves the shaping of fabrics, canvases and flexible materials such as foam rubber. Through positioning within the exhibition space, the resulting abstract forms investigate the ‘haptic’ dimension of the viewer’s gaze and the meaning of content. Here she presents works from the ‘RGB (skin)’ series (2015-17) and ‘Untitled’ (2015), as well as ‘Stretch Squeeze Still’ (2018), created for the exhibition. Thanks to the use of fabric, the sculptures convey an idea of living corporeal presence through their own instability. In ‘RGB (skin)’, the use of a scanner and the digital processing of the surface play a fundamental role in the artist’s approach. In ‘Untitled’, she uses a painter’s canvas and oil paint to construct objects characterized by an elementary formal language. This approach to corporeality – the relationship between forces that express themselves in the postures the works assume – gives life to ambivalent plastic manifestations, which open up strong narrative potential thanks to their contrasting nuances of meaning. (…)
Packed with energy and expressive power, the forms and compositions of Sara Enrico and Sophie Hirsch are abstract representations of experiences that we collect as corporeal entities in a spatial context.
Excerpt of the text by Sabine Gamper
