CUT
Gabriele Basch
The Berlin-based artist Gabriele Basch explores the role of signs, symbols and logos in our society in her work. She selects signs and motifs from a wide range of historical and social contexts and reworks them into large-scale paper cut-outs. In her series Fit, Gabriele Basch reconstructs stereotypical female poses from fashion magazines, giving them a new choreographic context through the paper-cut technique.
This technique evokes associations with the silhouette portraits of the 18th century and their subsequent kitschification in the 19th century. Gabriele Basch counteracts the underlying romanticism of this technique through her monumental formats. The works under the title Bis an’s Ende der Welt (Until the end of the world) are based on a 1950s photograph of a bouquet of flowers. By projecting the photograph multiple times from different perspectives, she created templates for the paper cut-outs. Resembling wildly overgrown undergrowth, they acquire a sculptural density of their own in interplay with their shadows. The artner swing, suspended in space and fitted with two pairs of headphones playing Rod Stewart’s ‘The First Cut Is the Deepest‘, invites visitors to become part of the installation through movement.