Josephine Sagna - NOIRE

The gallery "Schacher - Raum für Kunst" is proud to be able to show new paintings by the exceptional up-and-coming artist Joséphine Sagna in its new space on Olgaeck - and thus make a clear anti-racism statement in times dominated by clichés, prejudice, populism and a shift to the right.

In her multi-colored paintings, Joséphine Sagna addresses her experiences and emotions as a black woman in a predominantly white society and between several cultures. The focus is on the female body - in all its facets. Sagna draws her inspiration from social media, but also from magazines, catalogs, literature and music. In her paintings, self-portraying people confidently, sometimes provocatively, confront Western ideals of beauty. Anyone who looks into the challenging eyes of the protogonists, sees their self-confident gestures and reads the integrated written slogans will possibly question existing thought patterns and change their perspective on black women.

Through the - sometimes very spontaneous - inclusion of spray paint, marker, oil crayon and ink, Sagna continues the traditions of figurative painting and street art with contemporary means. Non-representational formal abbreviations and mutually overlapping layers of paint extend her pictorial compositions towards abstraction. The separation into foreground and background, main and secondary motif or two- and three-dimensional representation to which viewers are accustomed no longer applies in Joséphine Sagna's paintings. Fixed contours dissolve and allow us to look into the souls of the figures.