Martina Sauter – mixing memory and desire

From diverse moments she makes a mood. If Schwarzer Rock features a sleep-walking Cindy Sherman-type from the black-and-white film stills, Teppich sets the kind of scene an amnesiac might wake up in, her memories elusive but her feelings intact.

Teppich 2006 Dual panel C-print behind Plexiglas, 38.25″ x 47.25″

In Turundlandschaft, a door opens onto wallpaper in the artist’s studio. It’s a mountain with no cliffs of fall, available by the yard at a home decorating store. In a photo, already flat, Sauter could have restored a sense of volume. Instead, she took the Lynch road to lurid, cranking up the color of the ground. She has no wish to trick anybody, yet within her contrivances is a sense of the tragic.

Cold, impossible, ahead

Lifts the mountain’s lovely head,

Whose white waterfalls could bless

Travelers in their last distress.

Auden – 1936

On the left in Hofmauer, brick from the artist’s backyard. In the center, an alley from Hitchcock. The blur of the blue throws the dark brick in high relief.

Hofmauer 2006 Dual panel C-print behind Plexiglas 39″ x 53 “

Sauter’s Shapely Shadows and a New Apartment at Ambach & Rice through Oct. 31. She lives in Düsseldorf; this is her first solo exhibit in the U.S.