Serena Amrein

Born 1964 in Switzerland, lives and works in Germany

Represented by the gallery since 2015

Works by Serena Amrein

On Graphically Exploring Space. DAGMAR BURISCH

„Drawing is the epitome of my work”

Serena Amrein is a graphic artist. Patiently and accurately, she draws line by line on paper, has them merge into multilayered grid systems or explore space in a highly targeted manner. Her precisely thought out, formally reduced drawings are free of any hectic pace or breezy virtuosity and follow an inner, visual logic instead. To the artist, drawing means a quiet, focused mental game, whose rules at first only she herself sees through and which shall have to be discovered. For in addition to reflections on formal aspects, it is “seeing” that she, above all, focuses on in her work, in particular where an observance of rules is not easy to perceive. While drawing is, for many artists, merely a way-station on the path to a weightier final product, Serna Amrein uses it almost as her sole medium.

The very essence of drawing ideally conforms to her creative expression for drawings have always served as a means of cognition, a means to define the visible world with the help of aesthetic laws. From the visual excess of real phenomena, “line art” is able to abstract the essential in a targeted manner and condense it into a concise statement.

Drawing is a kind of reduced form. An increased selection and exclusion of information – such as the surrounding area, volume, or colour value – opens free spaces to analyze thoughts with. This „manual thinking” designs cartographies of an object, motion, and idea in parallel to visible reality – in short: a new and entirely independent visual reality.

Serena Amrein is highly familiar with all these properties of drawing and consistently applies them to her work. However, she knows about the ambivalence inherent in this medium, not least because it fulfils two opposite tasks: on the one

hand abstract research, on the other one concrete sensualization.

For a conceptual artist such as Serena Amrein defines herself, this could give rise to a conflict, for her clearly thought out and process-type visual systems demand intellectual concentration rather than sensual sensibility from beholders. Or so it seems at first. But this discussion based on the art of drawing happens in equal measures deliberately and intuitively, so that the secret power of the drawing may unfold its full effect and still include sensual perception.

It is precisely the tension between order and dissolution, between rules and variables, between system and deviation, which arouses Serena Amrein’s interest. She permits herself the freedom to set personally motivated accents within the systematically grown. She takes signals from everyday life, turning them into personal ones that cause her to transform them to a substantial extent by the very process of drawing.

Her art so-to-say establishes a bridge between the traditional means of expression and those of drawing that continually change because of our media-prone everyday life. Serena Amrein embarks on new paths in a classical medium and, thus, becomes one of a generation of artists whose positions are based on the expanded definition of drawing by the Minimal Art and Conceptual Art of the 1960s.

An essential characteristic for this change in artistic drawing was the emancipation of the line. It was successively isolated from the terminology of drawing and strongly enough abstracted to allow it to assume an autonomous role: no longer

used as descriptively “characteristic” but as a modular unit, it has since conquered the field, has emerged from the background into the space itself and easily blends with disciplines such as sculpture, installation, video, or digital media. For quite some time now, the line no longer merely appears as graphite on paper but comes across as imprint, cut, or silhouette, and even draws immaterial structures into a space with the help of light. Definitively rid of its function as a mere auxiliary and precursor, drawing today increasingly assumes the task of a research method or medium of reflection. Artists are called upon to experiment and use the expanded range of the drawn in order to study and render visible that which is hidden by the surface of things.

Thus also Serena Amrein, in whose oeuvre lines appear almost everywhere dressed up in their contemporary form as a constitutive and visually formative element. The interaction between line and space has developed into a central topic of her work and is presented in a large variety of facets. The artist defines space as a “mobile mass”, a multiperspective totality that has to be defined by drawing. And because drawing lends space to thoughts or “formulates” space, the line turns into a visual tool to render the simple determinants of space visible and, starting from there, convert and integrate them into complex classification systems. By crossing spaces with lines, the artist exposes structures.

In her raster and template drawings this simple basic structure expands into a complex figure with a multiplicity of levels as soon as specific variables are changed. By turning, layering, superimposing, and flipping, by dissolving and reshaping,

multiply linked spaces made of crossing lines emerge. This inventiveness regarding the chosen source material and technique (chalk line, silhouette relief, hole templates) prevents pictorial-spatial conceptual designs getting stuck in mere calculations.

In addition, this clearly thought out analytical procedure is for the most part also permeated by an element of the playful. To access “other spaces” by drawing and penetrate into unexplored spaces, Serena Amrein attempts to overcome constraints in a playful manner. She trusts into the seesaw between chance and necessity, lets herself drift during her graphic research and surprise by unexpected events while experimenting. It is only then that she transforms these chance aspects into a structured whole. Here, plan and intuition go hand in hand and convey graphic results that are – in spite of a strict order and regularity – filled with a rhythmic pulsation. Obviously, Serena Amrein intuitively follows the insight once formulated by Paul Klee, namely that the design possibilities inherent in graphics depend on being given life by the artist. Very much to the beholder’s pleasure, who likes to engage in the sublime joining of chance and method in these drawings and therewith hones his perceptive faculties – sensually as well as intellectually.

However, the artist not only manages to outmanoeuvre any constraints in the field of drawing but also regarding the media she uses. Serena Amrein skilfully moves around in several genres of work side by side without ever loosing her basic concept of researching space and transforming graphic structures from view. Objects, installations, or original landscape interventions aim to question and redefine visual realities and viewing habits and patterns. This is done by a targeted exposure of the internal structures to, subsequently, redefine their contents in the course of the design process. This transformation renders comprehension more specific and precise.

The themes and motifs of her visual research arise from everyday life: observations in the countryside, in (urban) space, architecture, objects of daily use, and finds – the entire wealth of the private and public environment is thus turned into a potential aesthetic template and fills her repository of ideas.

Serena Amrein is sufficiently careful and “measured” to observe the world around herself and to formulate an exact idea out of this abundance. The spatially tangible aspects of objects and installations are balanced by the ideas inherent in her drawings. These drawings are useful for her work process and, with their linearity, account for the design possibilities. The eye however is overjoyed to perceive them.