Works on paper, 2024
This series of works on paper was first presented alongside the bed sculpture Trousseau dérangé 1 as part of the exhibition Savoir Vivre at Chertlüdde Gallery, 16 February - 28 March 2024
All photos by Marjorie Brunet Plaza
A wall based works ink pen on paper, titles top to bottom:
The flame, 2024, 89.9 × 102 cm; 100 × 108 × 5 cm (framed)
Enchanted Stagnation, 2024, 75 × 101 cm; 82.5 × 110.5 × 5 cm (framed)
Mistles, 2024, t. b. a.
Blush Chart, 2024, 45.5 × 63.5 cm; 53.5 × 72 × 5 cm (framed)
In the exhibition’s first room, a paper bed mimics the artist’s own bed decorated by an Austrian hobbyist painter whose illogical mixture of motifs ranges from St. Nicholas to a detail of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Titled Trousseau dérangé 1 (disturbed dowry 1) (2022), Scherer’s bed displays objects in memory of a bride: parts of a dress, a pair of gloves, a mask-like face, and pieces of hair. The ambiguous enacted presence of the sculpture leaves us wondering whether it is, in fact, a bridal bed or a reliquary, whether the expected path of (young) women is a blessing or a condemnation.
The room is completed with Scherer’s drawings depicting different colorful sceneries on the walls surrounding the bed. These landscapes are charged with enchantment but also with conflict and complication, where nothing is entirely intact or perfectly clear. In one of them, the artist refers to Pisanello’s Vision of Saint Eustace, a painting from around 1438 famous for its richness of details and spatial incongruities. A hunter, Eustace, has a Divine vision when confronted with a deer. He decides to spare it and all other animals. This aspect – a change of attitude toward nature – anticipates the installation in the room to come while Scherer’s drawing, simple and light, celebrates Pisanello and the theme of Eustace without wanting to reproduce it. In opposition to Pisanello’s painting, Scherer remains deliberately ambiguous about the empathy felt at that moment.
Nina Hanz