Opening at the PASSAGE | Wolfgang Hambrecht & Sabine Metzger

Sabine Metzger works abstractly. Her painting develops from a special context of painterly brushstrokes and settings. In their sequence they can potentially counteract each other. As paintings, they combine to form an amalgam of strong color that is new from picture to picture. It is not because of their dynamic presentation that this painting seems so alive and anchored in the present. This painting does not follow any rules that we can take for granted as familiar or habitual. Instead of leading to a complex balanced composition, these paintings insist on an unresolved visual contradictoriness of their emergence. Little points to a subjectivity of this painting, much to an objectivity of factually present materiality. present materiality. What is moving is the drama that is inscribed in this materiality. Sabine Metzger is a master student of Alfonso Hüppi.

The abandoned places painted with a broad brush together with the goods left behind, the deserted interiors and the dwellings of the people in Hambrecht’s pictures have a visionary effect. They coincide with our exhibition location and its abandoned stores of the Kaiserpassage. Wolfgang Hambrecht shows insights into areas and living spaces that can be found somewhere out there, areas that on the one hand seem familiar to us, but on the other hand seem strangely alien. Mysterious and inviting on the one hand, abandoned and unreal on the other, always evoking loneliness. Confidentiality and alienation are thematized in Hambrecht’s paintings, and the progression of our civilization in the flow of time, which transports mankind into unimagined, mysterious futures. The cover of Hambrecht’s exhibition Purple Haze shows one of these places of loneliness and the search for a shelter in an alienated world full of incomprehension, lack of solidarity and exclusion in society.