François Ghebaly is proud to present Poseuses, a solo exhibition by Maine-based artist Sascha Braunig, opening in downtown Los Angeles on November 18th, 2023. 

Sascha Braunig’s paintings aim to warp, deform, deconstruct, and reconfigure hierarchical modes of representation to the point of disorientation. Undulating forms elbow their way to the surface of Braunig’s taut compositions, appearing both frozen and kinetic, occupying multiple temporal and spatial dimensions at once. One senses hidden worlds stirring in the dark pits of Braunig’s cut-out forms, energy lurking in the creases of a skirt, taunting and tracing the perforated edge of a hole. 

Jaws (2023), a sculpture depicting a toothy sinister smile, is pinned to the wall, its ear-to-ear grin stretching and sagging like a thorny sugar-coated mouth yearning to devour and digest. This prickly shapeshifting form appears throughout Poseuses, at times resembling an outstretched arm, a worm, or a thorny spine that splices and irritates the composition. In Poseuses (2023) a shadowy silhouette with Farrah Fawcett curls and a cinched waistline, a cousin of Braunig’s dress motif, appears in a contrapposto stance. The artist first encountered the image in the form of didactic signage at the Boston Logan Airport, standing out in Braunig’s mind for its blatant patriarchal agenda and prescriptive mode of gender training. 

Braunig’s velvety, chameleonic forms and calculated compositions visualize the plotting and negotiating of one’s identity, confronting the constant tension between our inner life and the outside world, between experience and representation. Several paintings depict clusters of figures that appear as paper doll chains. These accordion configurations present the gendered subject as pluralized—simultaneously tethered yet breaking from its center, resisting any singular definition or representation as a universal model or archetype. Like a hermit crab inhabiting a once discarded shell, Braunig turns inward to wrestle with identity and its inherent instability. Braunig playfully pokes at the flimsy walls that separate the body and psyche from the world.