Sabine Banovic
Swarm

Opening reception September 3rd, 2010, 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.
September 4th – October 9th, 2010

Sabine Banovic "Swarm"

“I draw the thing which makes a musician contort his face while playing music.[…] the emotional content of the line, the relationships which are developed and then dissolved in the interplay between these impressions; all of this reflects a form of contemplation […]”

As a student who attended the master classes of the Japanese artist Leiko Ikemura, Sabine Banovic’s work is reminiscent of the brush painting of the Far East in which lines and the sequence of brush strokes are crucial in the development of the visual space.

The filigree lines, tracery, nodules and spots which form and at the same time dissolve the bodies and landscapes in Banovic’s work take us, as we become immersed in her large scale drawings, into mystical parallel worlds and forms of thought.The dimensions dance between proximity and distance. Established associations and the emotions which go with them become mingled, are developed further and leave the viewer searching for visual reference points.

But it is especially the absence of defined contours and the alterna-ting contrasts between black and white which serve to dissolve the flat structures and spaces in her pictures so they always promote a mood of contemplation in the observer. There is a conscious alternation between emptiness and fullness in the portrayal of the opposites of abstraction and the clearly recognisable. The eye remains fixed on the individual islands of meaning as visual anchors, is submerged into numerous microcosms and finally becomes lost in the diffuse mist of the lines.