About the work

My paintings are narrative associative fields – while I work, phantasms surprise me, which then melds with current affairs and pertaining to literature, film and theatre. Through various artistic techniques, available image material and fictional images, I transform these fields into a vast network, which is always in accordance with world events.

One never knows what will happen, and doesn’t need to understand the narrative for this – is there indeed a story?

What’s fascinating is exactly that one doesn’t understand. I play with incomprehension and not with a given history.

For me they are incoherent scenes and yet I do imagine what came before and what could await: fragments, which evoke associations – the world as a stage of unpredictable spectacle: gruesome and full of secrets and games.

– FRANEK

About the Artist

FRANEK (Sabine Franek-Koch, born in Potsdam in 1939) studied painting and printmaking at the Berlin Art School (now Berlin University of the Arts) with Fred Thieler and Mac Zimmermann. Her first solo exhibition was in 1968 at the Pels-Leusden Gallery in West Berlin. Others followed in galleries, art clubs and museums at home and abroad. She taught at the Berlin Art School, the University of Art and Design in Helsinki and Lahti, and University of the Arts Bremen. FRANEK’s work includes paintings, drawings, prints, book illustration, sculpture, photography and film. In the 1970s and 1980s, the artist became deeply immersed in researching visual symbols used by the indigenous cultures of North and South America. She worked in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras and helped mathematician Maria Reiche to map spirals (Nazca Lines) on the Nazca Plains in Peru. Furthermore FRANEK recorded rituals for the Übersee-Museum in Bremen among the Lakota (Sioux) at the Rosebud Indian Reservation in the United States. The artist lives and works in Berlin and in Radegast, Lower Saxony.