Art Cologne • 16.11.–20.11.2022

For this year’s edition of Art Cologne, we are thrilled to welcome you, together with Sperling Munich, at Booth A-302 in Hall 11.2. Our booth showcases new work by Shahin Afrassiabi, Benja Sachau and Rachel Youn, reflecting on the convergence of naturalness and artifice, an ongoing theme in our artists’ oeuvres.

SHAHIN AFRASSIABI utilises conceptual approaches, resulting in elusive works that shift in between mediums and are merged in ever-changing ways. The painting titled “Still Life, study after F. B.” is the last of a series of paintings made during the pandemic years 2019-2021. It recalls the paintings of the Baroque and Rococo period and reframes their themes into a modern idiom. Familiar marks and painterly gestures pose as objects that attest to a life of excess and abject abandon.

RACHEL YOUN, a current MFA candidate in Sculpture at Yale University, crafts kinetic sculptures of plastic dollar-store flowers affixed to secondhand-sourced electric massage machines, wildly flailing around in the air, pulled and pushed. The pieces speak to Youn’s intersectional experience growing up as a non-binary Korean-American in the American Midwest. Clumsy, erotic, and absurd, their work identifies with the replica that earnestly desires to be real, and the failed object that simulates care and intimacy.

BENJA SACHAU creates media-critical works, adept interpretations of current discourses on hierarchization, power, the control of knowledge, and the visual forms these take. His conceptually calculated objects are multimedia implementations of the impossible, such as parascientific belief constructs and myths.