Introduction

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce Matti Braun's fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Entitled Bo Lak, the show includes 18 individual pieces, in dimensions ranging from 55 x 65 cm to 130 x 180 cm and 2 groups from a new series of abstract works showing seamless color sequences in pale tones. The pieces are made from silk panels in narrow aluminum frames. The dye process used for Braun's silk works has its roots in the artist's investigation and appropriation of traditional techniques of textile production often used for religious or ritualistic purposes, but unlike his earlier patola or batik series they no longer show the iconographic traces of their sources. Whereas previous series of silk paintings included brightly colored passages or circular splashes more overtly reminiscent of post-painterly abstraction, the new series uses a reduced palette to show soft color progressions. There is a palpable tension between the new work's restraint and its hypnotic lushness created by the combination of apparently simple means and the complexity of their creation, both the extensive references to the artist's project of investigating historical and cultural phenomena and the more immediate curiosity of how the seamless color modulations are created.

The floor of the gallery is covered with light fine-grained sand, creating an environment for the new silk pieces. The use of sand has some precedent in the artist's oeuvre, notably his 2003 Untitled, an ephemeral site-specific work for which several tons of Namibian soil was added to the public beach of the small Finnish Island Sandö, and his 2009 show Pierre at L'appartement 22, Rabat in Morocco for which Braun spread sand across the floor to function as a kind of anchor for cultural and historical references specific to the site. The current installation deliberately avoids any specific allusions to the sand's significance beyond its presence as subtle disruption. At the same time, since its smooth surface is reminiscent of the finely woven translucent silk fabric with its gradual color transitions the sand also acts as unifying element.

Matti Braun's work investigates the unexpected, often little known, effects of cross-cultural dynamics, making visible patterns of artistic migrations and cultural misrecognitions. The artist's previous solo exhibitions have often been organized around a specific example of such appropriation, taking for instance an elaborate web of interdisciplinary associations spun around the Indian physicist Vikran Sarabhai that include Mahatma Gandhi, Le Corbusier, the development of the Indian space program, the Ulm School of Design and Lynda Benglis as point of departure for displays that included textile works, objects, photographs and large-scale installations. The underlying narrative logic is not intended to explain the significance of the individual pieces but instead to demonstrate their polysemy. Braun's work is about the inability of objects to contain the meaning with which we burden them, drawing attention to the multiplicity of interpretations with which our personal and cultural histories imbue perception. The references are never illustrative or didactic but make visible an object's cultural trajectory and the mechanisms of cultural cross-pollination.

Matti Braun's work is characterized by a constant negotiation between concrete references and general allusions, between poetic ephemerality and an uncanny sense of visceral immediacy.