Staccato Glissando: Elisabeth Sonneck

13 September - 25 October 2024
Installation view, Elisabeth Sonneck, Solo exhibition, "Staccato Glissando", Ronewa Art Projects, Berlin. Photo credit: Jeremy Knowles
Installation view, Elisabeth Sonneck, Solo exhibition, "Staccato Glissando", Ronewa Art Projects, Berlin. Photo credit: Jeremy Knowles

Elisabeth Sonneck - Staccato Glissando
September 14 – October 25, 2024


Ronewa Art Projects is pleased to present a solo show of new works by Berlin artist Elisabeth Sonneck. Sonneck’s practice is a dialogue between the intrinsic properties of her everyday materials and the situational elements of space. For the exhibition Staccato Glissando, Sonneck presents a site-specific installation of paintings that underscores her sculptural approach to paper and her enduring experimentation with the infinite nuances of color. 

 

The musical terms staccato (abrupt end) and glissando (glide) describe the two core painterly gestures that characterize Sonneck’s painting practice. Her broad and steady freehand brushstrokes layer bands of color in a rhythmic repetition. This methodical technique provides Sonneck with a necessary counterbalance to the endless possibilities of color: like musical notes, an infinite spectrum exists between one color and another. The staccatostops at the end of her brush strokes leave behind a ledger of the numerous color variations and tonal relationships that emerge through her process.  

 

Echoing her understanding of color, Sonneck’s paper installations emphasize the fluidity and instability of physical forms in space, a mode she has been working on since 2006. Her signature “scrollpaintings” have no crystallized form – each may be suspended from the ceiling, unfurled across the floor, or standing cylindrically upright. Sonneck guides the long sheets of paper to behave in organic ways, allowing its weight and material tension to find a natural balance, often incorporating found objects as counterweights. Site-specificity is an integral part of Sonneck’s practice. Attuned to the unique characteristics of an exhibition space, the precise formation her installations take depends entirely on the anatomy of the space. Staccato Glissando also presents Sonneck’s “Clipage (variable)” series, which carries the principles of her practice into smaller hanging paper assemblages and introduces the paradoxical concept of reproduction. Arranged together with gouache paintings are photocopies of the works, skewing the separation between copy and original.