After tearing apart sheets of canvas, Sati Zech assembles the strips in horizontal and vertical rows. Sometimes overlapping them, she joins the rows with white archival glue, bits of puttylike plaster and thread before or after applying viscous domes and dots of red paint across the cloth’s surface. The result evokes a pleasantly tattered collage, its crimson fingerprint-like shapes spreading like landscape across the sheet’s ragged lines and seams. While the acts of layering, tearing, gluing and sewing produce works that are reminiscent of domestic handicraft, and the scarlet mounds of paint hint at historically ritualistic mark-making, Zech’s dynamic creations defy category. They inhabit a world of their own.
Born in 1958 in Southern Germany, Berlin-based painter Sati Zech attended the Berlin University of Fine Arts from 1982-1987, studying sculpture and drawing under Lothar Fischer. For nearly a decade, Zech lectured at the Academy for Fine Arts in Marrakesh and also taught at the Weissensee School of Fine Arts in Berlin.
