Born in 1958 in Southern Germany, Berlin-based painter Sati Zech attended the Berlin University of Fine Arts from 1982-1987, studying sculpture and drawing under Lothar Fischer. For nearly a decade, Zech lectured at the Academy for Fine Arts in Marrakesh and also taught at the Weissensee School of Fine Arts in Berlin.

When you feel strange

It is with great pride and pleasure that we present, for the first time in Mexico, the work of the German artist Sati Zech; formed as an artist after her social work as a nurse.

Excited by the reception that will have a work with deep anchorage in the psyche, made in a very thorough and conscientious way, with a lot of meditation by the artist; who expresses herself in photography, handmade soft sculpture made with goat leather, digital printing on canvas and paper, as well as for the first time dabbling in video and animated image.

Sati Zech shares with us the work she has been doing for several years, this emotional investigation of when you feel strange, which can be taken as a question or as an affirmation.

The work, polysemic by nature, as the one Sati shares with us, can be articulated as a journey to those places on the shore between the unconscious and the manifest, which we have all felt. Whether in the social, psychic or corporal limit. We can all recognize ourselves outside of ourselves, in uncomfortable situations; social when we are not in a known environment, health when you do not feel a part of your body, or family at times when you just do not agree with any of your relatives; or as the strangeness of those who visit a country for the first time.

In that situation in which tension is the first tuning, in which the shores of many binomials meet, such as fear-value, weight-lightness, attachment-dependence, which are so tight, about to be unleashed, in which, for example, you tie a knot with your own burden, as is the case of the photographs of the series Embrace (1). Or at that moment when you are so nervous and so entangled or in such a state of confusion that you feel like sinking into the blackness, but at the same time there is the latent possibility of getting out, jumping, daring, because you are flooded with fear, that dreadful moment, as in the case of the photograph Fear (2); or when the rash, the nervous irritation, is perceived and manifested through the skin, as in the case of the piece Skin (6), a curtain that at first glance is fascinating, but hides a health condition.

In each of these pieces we find that unfolding of the feeling towards the aesthetic materialization, which in a very successful way works with an extremely soft object, skin, or as a veil, or as a thin limit that can be both terrifying or beautiful when it is recognized by its color palette.

What these pieces reveal is not the evidence of a problem or the visibility of a complex emotional situation, but the resulting possibility of putting a binomial in tension. The next step that is triggered: the creativity of making a determination, of managing action in the liminal space between the subconscious and the palpable.

It is worth mentioning specifically the series of interviews, Sati Zech's most recent process, from her research When you feel strange. In them are embodied, in gestures, words, expressions, the tribulations, the oscillations of conflicting feelings of different people. At first hand we recognize the process of an interview that rightly delves into that personal, complex universe that we humans keep before the inner mirror of being.

olgaMargarita dávila
chief curator
lagos | estudios y residencias

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