This book, the first dedicated to the work of Michaela Sanson-Braun, traces thirty years of practice across Germany, London, and France. Bringing together paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and installations, it also features sixteen paintings conceived especially for this publication and printed on uncoated paper. Like a Russian doll, they create a mise en abyme of the book's own making, blurring the line between documentation and artwork.
As any talented bartender will tell you, the cocktail principle is the alchemy achieved from the skilful blending and balancing of ingredients and flavours, served with style and elan. A cocktail is no ordinary drink and a cocktail party no ordinary gathering; both frequently signify a special occasion and call for appreciation. More often than not, the partygoer is looking for a delightful distraction from everyday life, a sensory journey which stimulates their eyes and tastebuds, taking them to just the sweet spot between an unforgettable night and an excruciating hangover.
The 'cocktail party effect' is a psychological term for the human ability to filter out all extraneous sounds in a noisy environment to focus on a single stimulus. Michaela, however, experiences the opposite: she explores the world unfiltered and in overdrive. Surfaces, textures, curious forms, distorted proportions, surprisingly harmonious pairs, and glaring dissonances all register with equal force. In this sense, she herself becomes a cocktail: a restless mixture of ingredients, shaken and stirred.
Lapping up aspects of reality with remarkable vigour, her multifocal perception is anchored within a deeply personal reference system, that is grounded in experiences and relationships. Her cultural framework encompasses visual markers from Italian Renaissance painting and seventeenth-century Dutch still life, to vintage wine, film stills, advertisements, and pop music. Her observations are processed, many abandoned along the way. Others are dismantled, analysed, distilled, re-assembled, and eventually condensed into an artwork. Its shape is determined by the availability of the materials, and the subliminal skill of the artist.
Michaela's motifs are hugely varied, but the immense pleasure she takes from exploring optical effects—such as reflections on a variety of surfaces, light prisms, or shadows—is tangible. Equally impressive is her ability to apply a few dashes of paint, be it with a paintbrush, a sausage, or a gherkin, to capture the fragility of a withering leaf in an abundant bouquet, the luscious texture of a lump of butter or the saliva-covered skin taken from a pornographic image. Execution and form determine fiction and function.
Michaela's work is generously served and hugely tempting. Tasting it provides a sumptuous explosion of flavour. Wit and irony feature strongly. The audience is frequently seduced by titillating titles, or confronted with sculptures that challenge the boundaries between useful application, design, and decor. Yet, behind the cheerful façade, a contextual network of critical questions and statements awaits. Michaela fearlessly addresses topics that trigger her curiosity, rage, or disgust. She is not shy to expose her wounds to those who care to see them. Exploring the nuances of the cocktail, one might also be able to make out some bitter notes, such as a pinch at the patriarchy, the sweet subversion of bourgeois aesthetic codes, or a transient worry about the consequence of consumerism.
If the taste is not quickly obliterated by the next sip, these delicate flavours linger on and develop into a synaesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk, a cocktail-cosmos reflected in Michaela Sanson-Braun's work and personality alike.
Michaela Sanson-Braun (b.1975, Stuttgart, Germany) studied Fine Art and Art History at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Stuttgart (1994–1999), followed by an MFA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London (1999–2001). After exhibiting extensively in shows in London and Germany she now lives and works in Nantes (France).
