Giovanna Sarti: The essence arises in vanishing

Painting with rust

Giovanna Sarti (born 1967 in Cervia, Italy, lives in Berlin) studied under Per Kirkeby at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. In 2013, she took part in the exhibition "Painting Forever" at the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle in Berlin. Giovanna Sarti is a non-representational painter. For her, painting is initially an intensive exploration of the possibilities of the material; in addition to pigment, ink, varnish and charcoal, she uses metal dust and has recently been working in layers with rust. She first applies it to the canvas and then allows it to set before working on the canvas in the studio with acrylic colours, ink and/or varnish. It can happen that the various painting media react chemically with each other. Such processes can only be controlled to a limited extent, and so the artist consciously utilises the material's own dynamics, as it is precisely this kind of process-based work that plays an important role for her. However, the layered structure of the works is less a reference to external conditions than an analogy to existential psychological processes, as the layers of colour lie on top of each other like memories. "The slow
Daily layering of images, thoughts and feelings allows me to understand my work as real and not as an abstraction," says Giovanna Sarti. And like nature, memory or life, Giovanna Sarti's works combine beauty with roughness. Even when the pictures glisten with metal dust or even when pink comes into play, they maintain the tension as soon as the rust rages across the coarse linen like a great dance.

Exhibition:
Kunstverein Heilbronn, 24/9 - 20/11/2016