tingling fingers (solo)
ASPN Galerie, Leipzig, June - July 2024
Franziska Koch’s works are gestural, direct and immediately evoke emotions.
Koch applies the oil paint to the canvas with quick, energetic movements – layer by layer. She works wet on wet, with no time for a drying process or for overthinking situations. What is depicted must be transferred to the canvas immediately.
This approach makes the works vibrate, allows us to immerse ourselves in the relief of the impasto materiality, follow the brushstroke, take a brief breather on the glazed surfaces and then return to the vibrant colours. Finally, we take another step back to grasp what is depicted: what we see are painterly snapshots of intimate encounters or social interactions.
The ambivalence between pastosity and glaze not only sets pictorial accents on the canvas that stimulate the narrative but also blurs the binary gender boundaries. The focus is on the (purely) interpersonal moment, which deals with themes of closeness, connection, alienation, queer identities and sexuality.
Franziska Koch supposedly gives us an insight into the emotional world of other characters. However, what really happens between the characters is open and left to our own interpretation.
[Text: Laura Gerstmann, 2024, translated with DeepL.com]
