In her paintings, Kerstin Brätsch puts notions of artistic genius and authenticity to the test. With her fellow artist Adele Röder, she has formed the collective DAS INSTITUT, an “import-export agency” designed to counteract the commercialization of their works and artistic personae by making imagery circulate between paintings and printed fabrics, posters and knitting patterns. And within Brätsch’s paintings, too, the pictures are moveable. She deliberately does not paint her abstract structures on canvas, instead working in oil on paper and sometimes using no more than simple magnets to attach the resulting pictures to panes of plexiglass. Temporarily bound to their support medium, they might be rolled up and carried off at a moment’s notice if desired. This flexibility of her art is even more prominent in Brätsch’s most recent series, the “Interchangeable Paintings”: three layers, each an oil painting on transparent Mylar film, form a picture when superimposed. But the order of the planes is variable; they may and indeed ought to be interchanged, producing a wide variation of motifs.

For “Texte zur Kunst”, Kerstin Brätsch has developed an artist’s edition that translates these principles into a small format. One copy consists of nine pieces of film (image above), each bearing its own nonrepresentational pattern. They may likewise be stacked and are easily attached to the metal bar (included) using magnets. The artist deliberately leaves the number and selection of motifs and the order of their combination to the viewer, including him in the structure of collaboration that is a principle of her art. (image below: examples of films being layered)