Pleased to meet you

Kerstin dreschel makes careful, loving paintings that each begin with a photograph. Projecting initial studies onto canvas, she creates a bare-bones drawing in pencil before using atmospheric and intimate painterly marks to further explore her subject. Often knowing the person being portrayed - ‘there’s always a connection to me, my family, my friends, my private life’ - dreschel digs with her paintbrush, building works with layers of airy, sparse colour that allow a delicate tension between privacy and exposure.

The artist originally studied stage design in Berlin and this is evident in her razor sharp awareness of character, precise lighting and concise description of space that ranges from constructed three dimensionality to the flattened, disappearing and blank. Previously dreschel worked in photography, exhibiting photo-wallpaper in everyday places like Berlin’s Westend train station and as far afield as Mexico City. It was not until 2001 that she presented a series of paintings, with another theatrical element in mind, that of time. The slow process of creating a painting, and the even slower accumulation of a body of work, lends meaning to these works.

Despite their photographic origins, the paintings are much larger than snapshot size. ‘I always try to create spaces in which one is confronted one to one with a scenario’ says dreschel, in an interview with Oliver Koerner von Gustorf. ‘I want to tell a story or describe conditions,’ she explains, ‘I need to be inspired by a person... feeling one’s way into another person’s life in a strange apartment is very exciting. Diving in - or to say it with pathos - entering into the world of another.’

The theme of ‘toi et moi’ (you and me) so strong in the psychological work of Louise Bourgeois will perhaps be played out, though in a low key style, in this exhibition. In parallel to this is another theme: the question of artistic autonomy. For the ‘Jan-Holger’ of the exhibition’s title is Jan-Holger Mauss - an artist and self-appointed muse for this project - the bikini being a response to the work of another artist, Eva Grubinger, who posted a bikini pattern on the internet. Mauss has developed a network of artists and works of art, the task of each being to depict ‘Bikini Man.’

In group exhibitions of these depictions, the focus is inevitably on Mauss himself, and the concerns his own work touches on - gender, queerness, physicality and intellectual property to name but a few. As the show at Vane is Kerstin dreschel’s alone, it will be fascinating to see how this alters the work, and whether it sheds new light on the questions involved. Certainly her paint bristles with the energy of a close personal encounter.

‘Jan-Holger’, Vane Gallery, Kings House, Forth Banks, Newcastle, January 10 - February 2. Tel: 0191 261 8281 or see www.vane.org.uk for further details.

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