Kunstkatalog Stefanie Brehm

10 It was 22 metres long, and securely suspended from the façade of the Munich art academy, a large, for- midable plait made of white bubble wrap – Rapunzel might have left it there on a brief visit to the English Garden (p. 4). At the time, art student Stefanie Brehm looked on smilingly, poised and engaged as ever. Surprising people with her art, leaving them to work out its meaning with a mischievous air, always brings a smile to her lips. She certainly succeeds in this by continuously playing with form, adding a well-con- sidered element of colour. Stefanie Brehm rightfully takes her place among those ceramic artists who constantly tread new paths to push back the bounda- ries of traditional ceramic art. In an interview, the artist states her intention of piquing the viewer‘s curiosity through her choice of material and colour, inviting them to explore and take a closer look. She enables ceramic to shed its usual guise; her large-format works are not composed of many parts, but wrought in a single piece, an immen- se effort on her part. The kilns used to fire the works are also huge. The dimensions and oneness of these works defy the general conception of ceramic art, reinforced by colour combinations and glaze appli- cation techniques not necessarily associated with ceramics at first glance. Stefanie Brehm predominantly works with a spray gun and compressed air to apply the glaze to the bisque. She applies the colour guided by intuition and exper- tise, in a very free approach, generally without any preliminary sketches or templates, models or layouts or according to any specific technique. Yet there is usually reason to the rhyme of her actions and mo- vements during application. Scraping off colour or deliberately building up several thick layers of colour, which can cause the islets or bubbles to form in the glaze, are phenomena normally deemed as defects, but which she tolerates or indeed intentionally pro- vokes. Notwithstanding an initial reluctance to settle on a particular material, colours play a key role on or in all of the materials she uses as they sort of blend into the material. Form and colour, sculpture and painting form a whole. The vibrancy of the colours is enhanced by the brilliant surface of a glaze or plastic. The co- lour needs the clarity and calm of the cylindrical form to spread freely and dynamically. Every movement is prompted by an intuitive impulse. The impulses are a synthesis of Brehm’s thoughts and feelings. She focu- ses on imagining which colours the sculpture would like to connect with. Using samples that show her how the colours will actually look after firing, she defines a scheme of colours and then a brisk marathon of deci- sions ensues: which colour will dominate, which will be used first and which last, what manner of actions does she want to work with? Are the main lines going to be vertical, horizontal, diagonal or circular? Where is the glaze going to be removed to expose the layer underneath? Applying one colour prompts the next. The colours interact until a sort of harmony is created through their movement, engagement and layering. The calm phase of turning is counterpoised by the swift action of applying the glaze. Chance and sur- prise are the artist‘s assistants, their influence often revealed in the layering of several colours. Anticipa- tion and suspense mount, as only after firing will the artist see how the different colours have interacted to become a single entity of form and colour. Although many different separate images may be evoked from various angles, form and colour are inseparable. The form determines how the light falls on the colour, for instance. The vitreous glaze affords an almost excessive durabi- lity, preserving the pigments and colouring oxides for centuries or even millennia. The glazed ceramics thus radiate a noble resilience. Circle and cylinder The qualities of austere and rational may well be applied to the form of the ceramics. By contrast, the colour disrupts or at least impinges on the tranquillity of the form, bringing it to life. Emotion and concen- trated calm hold sway in Stefanie Brehm’s work. And does not the word “concentration” include the idea of centring, which is the skill primarily involved during the formative phase at the wheel? Her marked prefe- rence for cylinders, obviously a very suitable form, in- itially stems from her fondness for circles and turning objects on the potter‘s wheel. “No matter what you make on it, it‘s kind of round. For me, the cylinder is a circle grown tall,” says the artist simply yet succinctly. She turns and chivvies the clay into towering cylin- ders of monumental dimensions. Later, in the exhibi- tion, some works are also normally sized, at least in terms of conventional expectations of ceramics. The circle, in modified form, can be found in many of her earlier paintings. She has always made a point of On the bliss of colour on columns, or how Stefanie Brehm breathes life into basic forms Prof. Dr. Johannes Kirschenmann