Die Sein: Para Psychics (excerpt): Kerstin Brätsch

For this year’s edition of Berlin Art Week, Galerie Thomas Schulte presents Die Sein: Para Psychics Expanded (Excerpt), its first solo presentation of Kerstin Brätsch. The gallery’s Corner Space and adjacent window front are transformed into a cosmos or organism of its own: Brätsch’s intricate floor work with a mosaic look sprawls across, facing the sky, as the Corner Space’s tall windows filter in altered sunlight from above. The organic forms, bold colorations and patterns of cardboard honeycomb panels on the walls – enlarged motifs from Brätsch’s stucco marmo works – resemble formations in agate geodes or psychedelic pareidolias, both giving structure to and inhabiting the space as eerie beings. Against this mutating backdrop is a selection of works from her titular Para Psychics series: intimate, Mandala-like drawings in colored pencil that appear as living, ever-transforming constellations in themselves. Throughout, the stratification of time seems to both stretch open infinitely and condense into new forms – with ghostly traces appearing as though fossilized in stone.