re_touch

Putting one's own body in relation to the environment is an elementary aspect of Barbara Proschak's artistic practice. Since 2018 she has overwritten her own printed photographs with small vertical lines, which, placed close together, produce strips of colour, bars of colour and finally areas of colour. They become transformations of photographs achieved through painterly intervention. The colour effect changes depending on the point of view and the surrounding light. Sometimes the overpainted photograph is visible and shimmering through the veil of colour, disappearing behind an opaque surface.

A change in the viewer's position is now necessary to detach oneself from the detail of the lines and to recognize the large underlying structure - it only gradually becomes clear that it is a photograph which is covered by the coloured overpainting, whereby the depicted disappears into the approximate. In her works, Proschak creates a new, art-immanent reality. She shows unexpected connections between individual images and her overdrawing, in which she transforms the factuality of the world into a pictorial space for searching and experiencing. Her works are interventions with the known and familiar, questioning the expected. It is always about the search for new forms, for new possibilities of perception and interpretation.

In spring 2022 Barbara Proschak published Material - Anhaftung - variabel, a comprehensive 500-page artist's book that focuses on her sketchbooks from the past ten years. This compendium reveals the wide range of Proschak's photographic and pictorial investigations and highlights her artistic practice. It is always about collecting objects in images and placing the individual images in relation to one another. The publication reveals the constant connection between the individual image and the series and documents the extent to which each individual image originates from a larger context and at the same time can merge into a new, unexpected context.

Barbara Proschak is part of »Guest Room: Heather Canlas Rigg & Emmy Lee Wall«.