Françoise Bassand, Julia Brunner, Stefan Endewardt, Alex Lebus, LEO, Paul Maciejowski

SATZ is a show that looks at how contemporary artists are using language forms to inflect contemporary Art. The written word has long found a place within visual arts but in the last century this often came to mean something with a particular look-and-feel, a weighty conceptualism. In recent years, however, artists have looked for inspiration beyond the legacies of conceptual art and are rather imbibing the influence of graffiti, social politics, anime, graphic novels and online spaces to find new ways to include the written word within visual forms.  

Swiss artist Françoise Bassand studied at the F+F School for Art and Design Zürich and emerged as a painter before taking a 20 year break from art to immerse herself in political action. Now re-engaging with her creative origins, the painterly considerations of form and colour from her earlier works have evolved to include the language of protest. Sardonic slogans, roughly sprayed onto day-glo backgrounds, give voice to frustrations at life, art and their place within cultural economies. Like Bassand, LEO has a parallel involvment in political activism and a long-standing interest in the visual culture of demonstrations, most notably the fabric banners made for trades union marches and peace protests in this native northern England. For Jägerschere he is producing a new work taking these approaches to consider the context of rural Brandenburg. Julia Brunner seems to nod to a conceptual legacy in the way she conducts walking tours which generate text works. But her videos aren’t trying to be a cool, singular reductions. Rather the words ripple enticingly across the screen, documenting and visualising the pernicious divide between rural and urban Germany. Similarly Paul Maciejowski gathers together stories, but in his case from within a war-torn Ukraine. He interviews his protagnists, sketches them in aquarel and gives voice to the fears and wishes of Ukrainians caught in geopolitcal hell that has shattered any sense of the everyday. Alex Lebus and Stefan Endewardt both use a typographical language in their respective work but the point is much more that exploration of graphic forms. For Alex Lebus it is the placing of the person in the context of their own realisation and identificiation. Her mirror works allow the landscape that surround the viewer to be a site of self-knowing. Stefan Endewardt is keen to provide viewers with tools for their own expressions and his alphabets are precisely that, visual equipment for others to order according their own desires.

27 April 2025 - 25 May 2025 and 15 June 2025 - 14 July 2025