Like most of her fellow painters trained at Yale, Sascha Braunig follows a recipe for her small canvases that invariably goes something like this: Mix art-historical references into a bowl, leaven with a heaping of pop-cultural yeast, stick in the oven, and bake. In Braunig’s case, what comes out is a crazy pie of Surrealism flavored by Op Art. As her current show demonstrates, the result can be quite tasty, even if it sometimes veers off in the direction of album-cover art or the fevered imaginings of a Sunday painter on acid.
Braunig is no amateur, of course; her technique suggests a close study of Magritte or Tooker’s hypnagogic precisionism, though she prefers to call her approach “superficial realism.” Portrait heads are ostensibly her subjects—ostensibly because, in most cases, they possess only the vaguest hints of human features: Picture something like De Chirico’s dressmaker dummies rendered as loosely woven baskets of linguine or glowing accretions of pink pearls.
She creates her fantastical images by starting with sculptural maquettes, using them to lose herself in a studio reverie. What emerges seems of the moment yet of the past, sophisticated yetprovincial—paradoxes that, along with her command of color and form, stick in the mind’s eye.
All of which has generated a lot of buzz, deservedly so. When your paintings are hailed as the standout of the New Museum Triennial—a show that, as its billing warns, exhaustingly surrounds its audience in a cacophony of digital-age exertions—that’s saying something. It’s especially remarkable given their modest scale.
So yes, Braunig’s compositions provide many pleasures, though their point remains elusive. For now, let’s just say they’re the stuff that dreams are made of.—Howard Halle