«Grace at the Boundary of Knowledge» – Sandra Boeschenstein at Maria Antônia Centre [BR]

Through her fine lines, Sandra Boeschenstein [CH] plays with the perception of all those who experience her works. Her drawings explore the limits between the tangible and the intangible, image and language, information and poetry, and between humour and doubt.

It is with an investigative eye that she develops her pieces, reaching out to an approach of research and often to science. “When I’m working among scientists and I say that I will research, there are so many misunderstandings, they think I’ll jump into their field. So, I love to provoke and just say that research is much older than science. What is the basic quality of research? When human being started to go for complex things with repetition and variation, and this started very early,” says the artist.

One of these interdisciplinary researches was carried out at the IEA, the Institute for Advanced Studies at USP, the University of São Paulo, where Sandra worked during the months of July and August 2022 for the exhibition «Encantar na Fronteira do Conhecimento / Grace at the Boundary of Knowledge». Presented at Maria Antônia Centre in São Paulo, the show features a few series by the artist, as well as a site-specific work, and seeks the limits between art and knowledge.

 

Her pieces explore the two-dimensional aspect of the drawings, perspective effects, and the play with three-dimensional objects. In one of the works, a series of black horizontal lines create a uniform mass that takes on new meanings when viewed next to the image of a faucet (from which water seems to flow) or in front of a pair of yellow trainers, hanging from the wall, which suggest movement. In another piece, three pencils with broken ends are accompanied by the words “paradigm shift”, while a solitary pencil, with the same chip as the others, says only: “accident”.

“Humour and doubt are a wonderful combination. My main interest is the play withing perception and though, to bring medias, like image and language, together and confront them,” stated Sandra in a conversation with the public during the show’s opening.

“That is the thing with drawing, the materiality is so thin, so it is your perception that fascinates you. And being able to perceive is fundamental to understand and talk about big themes.”

The exhibition, running from August 6 to November 22, 2022, is a collaboration with IEA-USP and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld (ZiF), Germany, and is curated by Britta Padberg, executive director of the ZiF between 2008 and 2020, and Professor Martin Grossmann, from the School of Communications and Arts at USP.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sandra Boeschenstein [CH] is a visual artist who lives and works in Zurich. She studied Philosophy and Art History at the University of Zurich for a year and graduated as an artist from the University of Arts in Bern in 1995. Through drawing, she proposes to seek knowledge and analyse the interaction between perception and thought. Over the past few years, Sandra has expanded her drawing on paper to drawings on walls, in which she arranges real objects that relate to the images and lines in space.