An Index of Shadows: Sarah Ortmeyer by Stephanie Cristello

Stephanie Cristello, Mousse, February 26, 2020
Not all shadows are acts of love. But by nature the shadow is sensual—it traces the outlines of objects and bodies whose forms impart silhouettes onto a given surface when a light source is interrupted. Identity and sex become irrelevant. Within shadows, the light does not go away, but merely exists upon another plane. It touches something else, between the source of the projection and a screen.
 
This distinction is particularly palpable in the work of German artist Sarah Ortmeyer, whose exhibition INFERNO CHICAGO (2019) enacts the patterns of shadows latent within forms of image-based language. Ortmeyer has explored the relationship between light and darkness throughout her oeuvre, mainly through representations of chess, the surface area of the board being equally split between these polarities. In a selection of paintings from her recent GRANDMASTER series (2012–ongoing), shown at Kunstverein Munich in 2018, images of skies of different hues (bright blue, humid beige, sunset pink) are obscured by a grid of black paint—either massive or miniature boards that skew the works’ relationship to the viewer’s body.
 
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