Published on the occasion of the exhibition Von Alters her/From the Old, International Studio Programme at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
Texts (English) by Christoph Tannert, Federica Bueti, Claudia Sarnthein
Designed in collaboration with Loose Joints, ISBN 978-3-941230-66-8

Drawings 2012–2015, designed in collaboration with Polimekanos
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Episode at Blyth Gallery, Imperial College, London, 2015

“The intensity of Claudia Sarnthein’s images For Jacob lies with their being at once images of woundedness, and wounded and wounding images. It seems the three imperatives Lache nicht Weine nicht Zeige deine Zähne nicht [Don’t laugh Don’t cry Don’t bare your teeth] of the accompanying eponymous book might be expanded by a fourth: Mache Dir kein Bild [Don’t venerate the image]. A subversive logic underscores the nine-foliate series: the more iconographic and commonplace the image, the more decidedly it is obliterated – budding pixels perforating it, blanks slicing, bars blackening it, and ultrasound irradiating it. However, the more raw and textured the image – barely tangible behind gauze fabric or imbedded in a stroke of fur, woven in like bast fibre or emerging out of marble – the more the image’s integrity is preserved in itself...” Dr. Birgit Griesecke, BOX Berlin, 2007

“Lache nicht Weine nicht Zeige deine Zähne nicht [Don’t laugh Don’t cry Don’t bare your teeth]: Incantation for withstanding a great pain, by locking oneself off from the inside. The images cradled in the visual poems of the four-part book – loud feverish images of fear, and those jaggedly arising from the fatigue of inconsolability – bear testimony to a violent process of ineffable parting, subject to such imperative consequence with which the sound eloquence of complete images have been crossed out, cropped and punctured...” Dr. Birgit Griesecke, BOX Berlin, 2007

“The sense of the partial, and its complexity, also suffuses the exquisite drawings of Mutter Seelen Allein, a large-format publication of 26 images, very finely executed, and influenced by the likes of Eva Hesse (...). At once anti-realist, deeply felt and emotionally resonant, they are, in the artist's own words, ‘in search of a pictorial incident, where something is just appearing or about to disappear: something which is coming into being against the void or leaving a void behind. I am asking how much is necessary to be nascent or to remain.’ An urgent question in these difficult times, and one that is profoundly elaborated in Sarnthein’s beautiful realised work.” Gareth Evans, Time Out, London 2005

“In On Fragments Sarnthein assembles an often revelatory series of quotations from European artists, philosophers and poets into an argument around the multi-faceted nature of the fragmentary that moves far beyond purely aesthetic investigation into something of much wider application. The question she asks is how an engaged understanding of the ‘incomplete’, an accurate incarnation of the passage of life, might help us to survive, endure and thrive. While the form might suggest the aphoristic compendia of fellow continentals Cioran and Canetti, this collage is humanised by its inclusivity and anchored by a richly personal threaded narrative that suggests Sarnthein has learnt such lessons very much at first hand.” Gareth Evans, Time Out, London 2005

“But while I am curating these events, I note clearly moments of standstill, natural halts in continuity. Things suddenly settle down into an interim plan: as if, for a while, they agree to pause in their work before moving on again. This is the moment when I take a picture. I record the instant of stillness before the process resumes. The bird’s-eye view of the table enables me to examine the composition of the manifold modes of order, but it is my working pattern which composes the layout of the images. Looking back at the chronology of these frozen interruptions, I wonder if the now linear series has captured something of the complex, invisible network behind the orders. And does the sequence contain references to yet unknown projects? Furthermore, how large are the intervals between the stills, what has happened in between, and what exactly has changed from photograph to photograph? In retrospect, the chain of images has become a series of fragments more than a picture-story. The longer I look at it, the more it conceals. Even more so for the viewer, for whom this foreign order remains an unknown territory.” Claudia Sarnthein, London 2001