Alexandra Sonntag - Homeland

In the organizer's words:

The Emde Gallery is pleased to present Alexandra Sonntag's second solo exhibition, which provides further insight into the artist's multifaceted painterly oeuvre.

In her works, Alexandra Sonntag often takes her own life as a starting point, translating fleeting experiences and memories of everyday life into multi-layered, narrative pictorial worlds. At the center of this exhibition are works from the series "Homeland", which gave the exhibition its title in 2021 - medium to large-format oil paintings in which the artist critically examines the concept of home. A concept that is often associated with the buildings we grow up in and the places that surround us.
Accordingly, the works are inspired by the architectural and landscape features that line the artist's daily route from her home in the city of Bielefeld to her studio in the neighboring small town of Herford.

This leads through frayed suburban areas, followed by more rural areas. Alexandra Sonntag herself describes this as a path "through an East Westphalia, far away from the metropolises, the centers of art, neither rural nor urban, neither beautiful nor ugly, but also beautiful, also ugly." An area that defies clear categorization and is instead permeated by contrasts and ambivalences.

She is not interested in an exact reproduction of reality. Rather, she uses a suggestive visual language with a narrative undertone that combines characteristics of both representational and abstract painting and deliberately leaves room for ambiguity. Recurring motifs are everyday, unspectacular architecture: petrol stations, apartment blocks and detached houses, temporary buildings such as telephone boxes, high seats or bus stops. Bunkers and containers also find their way into the "Homeland" series.

As a rule, the individual architectures are not shown in isolation, but in the context of their surroundings. Works such as "Haus blau", "halbes Haus" or "missing link" show open, fragmented architectures that provide insights into the interior of these buildings and thus expose their general basic forms. However, the contours of the houses are almost dissolved, individual details merely hinted at with rough brushstrokes and only vaguely discernible. The same applies to the surrounding structures of flowing circular or cloud-like formations and figurative elements that alternate between the real and the imaginary. They are associated with trees, the sky and buildings or form organically proliferating structures that are reminiscent of rhizome-like connections and lend the living spaces a mysterious quality. The viewer's eye meanders through these atmospherically dense, restless pictorial worlds in a mixture of seeing and reading. The high-contrast, shimmering colors chosen by Alexandra Sonntag form an additional, irritating layer. As a result, she not only achieves a very subjective view of her built environment, characterized by ambivalence and alienation, but also an expanded perspective on the complexity of everyday life.

Alexandra Sonntag's compositions are characterized by a state of in-between, of constant change: It is as if they were only visually fixed for a moment, as if they were about to start moving again at any moment. This impression is emphasized by the gestural-expressive visual language: Blobs of paint, dripping paint noses, coarse brushstrokes and streaks of paint dynamize the picture surface and at the same time emphasize the process of painting itself.

Many of her paintings look like film stills. The artist herself describes the journey from her home to her studio as "a (visionary) film", which she sequences into stills and translates into painting. However, it is not the inhabitants of these places that are the main characters in this "movie", but the buildings themselves.

The main work in the exhibition, "Tankstelle Herforder Straße", illustrates this particularly impressively. It shows a petrol station illuminated at night, set in perspective against a gloomy sky. The image is imbued with a cinematic presence and literally draws the viewer into the picture. The foreground, with its dissolving areas of color in orange, pink and blue-green, remains undefined.
Petrol stations characterize our everyday lives and offer a familiar sight - reassuring, but at the same time impersonal in their standardization and functionality. Above all, however, they are transitional places, symbols of the transitory. By concentrating the depicted scenery entirely on the deserted petrol station, which stands alone under a vast sky, Alexandra Sonntag also evokes a feeling of loneliness and isolation.

Petrol stations repeatedly play an important role in art - as they do in film. There are numerous references in Alexandra Sonntag's work. First and foremost, it is reminiscent of Edward Hopper's famous painting "Gas" from 1940, which shows a lonely petrol station with three bright red pumps in front of a dark forest at dusk. Even "Nighthawks" comes to mind, even if it does not depict a petrol station but a diner at night. Similar to Hopper, Alexandra Sonntag succeeds in creating a powerful atmosphere that conveys a feeling of loneliness and simultaneous familiarity and allows the everyday to tip over into the surreal. One is also inevitably reminded of Ed Ruscha's iconic painting "Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas" from 1963, an extremely dynamic composition that in turn emphasizes the transitory character of the petrol station.

The high seats are also highly symbolic motifs: functional wooden structures that bear witness to human intervention in nature, built to make themselves invisible, as it were, and yet watch over the landscape. They embody both the longing for mastery and for connection. In "Hochsitz Trebel", a high seat in bright red rises up on a lush green meadow, while a dark forest stretches out in the background. The powerful coloring detaches the construction from its usual inconspicuousness and transforms it into an almost monumental sign reminiscent of industrial architecture, oscillating between adaptation and strangeness.

In addition to the works from the "Homeland" series, the exhibition will show a selection of new works that deal with the theme of landscape. These unfold a more "cheerful" mood, appearing lighter, more playful and at the same time much more abstract. The artist often dissolves the subject into ornamental areas of color. The loosely and elegantly applied network of lines in the painting "Dickicht" is driven to perfection. In other landscape paintings, foreground, middle ground and background merge into repeating patterns that are reminiscent of natural structures - such as the countless leaves of a tree. "Just as our relationship to nature is fragmented, Alexandra Sonntag works with set pieces of landscape painting. The big picture is passé," as art historian Jana Duda aptly writes. However, this fragmentation is not only a loss, but also an opportunity to rethink the conventional categories of landscape and painting.

In her most recent works, Alexandra Sonntag takes the process of abstraction to the extreme by completely freeing herself from all representational and narrative elements. On small formats, thickly applied oil paint and squeegeed structures create dense, color-intensive compositions that focus on the materiality of color.

Alexandra Sonntag (*1969 in Herford) studied painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig. After completing her studies, she was a master student of John M. Armleder. Her works have been shown in numerous national and international solo and group exhibitions, including at the Museum Bünde, the Kunstverein Herford, the Kulturamt Frankfurt am Main, the EPH Zurich, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bern, the Bielefelder Kunstverein, the Museum Marta Herford, the Frauenmuseum Bonn and the Franke Museum Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Works by Alexandra Sonntag are represented in numerous public collections, for example in the collection of the Kunstverein Neustadt am Rübenberge, the Treuhand Frankfurt, the Stadtwerke Bielefeld and in various private collections. She lives and works in Bielefeld/Herford and Geneva.