CALM AFTER THE STORM
On Hanna Sass's graphic works
(viewed from the sea)
Solo exhibition "Searching for Silence"
Galerie Paul Scherzer Halle
07.03. – 11.04.2026
Foaming, rocking, roaring, trickling, rolling, grinding, flowing, still - when viewing Hanna Sass's works, associations with the sea soon arise, even though they are anything but landscapes. In fact, her work has developed stringently in a clearly non-representational direction in recent years, gestural and in dialogue with the material. And yet this memory of the sea is not surprising, for the ocean itself, in its sheer immeasurable vastness, can no longer seriously be counted among the realm of the representational. Rather, it is a dynamic, an element, a dimension, or a force. Various aspects of this force come to bear in Hanna Sass's different series of works.
(I) The "salty galaxy" series is the result of experiments with salt crystals on copper plates. The crystals continue to grow there, and with the addition of acetic acid, verdigris forms in the combination of copper, water, and oxygen. The growth processes of these mineral and metallic structures are later quasi-documented with the print of the plate – as an embossed print without any color, whereby the surface structure of the grown salt crystals on the plate is delicately pressed into the soft handmade paper, which only becomes visible when approaching the image closely. In addition, the colors of the grown substances are transferred by the print. The whole thing looks like a landscape, like cartographic sections of atolls in warm waters, or like rainforests, traversed by countless rivers. The sheet functions here as a kind of petri dish for the beauty of mineral growth processes, and the calm and concentration radiated by these sheets also evoke hints of geological slowness.
(II) In a second version of the "salty galaxy" series, a mixture of acrylic paint and salt crystals is applied to copper plates – the crystals are thus firmly connected to the plate. Afterwards, the plates are also gesturally worked in a drypoint manner with a circular saw and then printed as classical etchings. Here, completely different images emerge. The calm gives way to an untamed storm, a roar, a surge on the high seas. Water from above, from below, everywhere. Spray splashes, torrential rain, storm clouds, the maelstrom grinds – the images in this series are almost audibly turbulent in their impetuous physicality. The image seems to swallow me as a viewer in a great wave.
(III) "Still" - the simple placement of a horizontal line evokes landscape: a horizon emerges and divides the image into top and bottom, into water and sky. Space arises, vastness arises. Except for this one recognizable line, the sea far out is formless and immeasurable. The line drawn in wood with a circular saw, raw but precise, the two resulting surfaces colored in different shades of blue before printing, partly with a color gradient, create a complex depth effect. Small grain patterns of the plywood board are printed along – and appear in the image without any intervention as whitecaps of small waves, rocking peacefully in the foreground. The material is given a say. Later, in the further sheets of the series, vertical lines are added to the horizon line, dancing irregularly across the sheet. While the sea was just resting in peaceful stillness, the horizon now begins to tremble under threatening signs: approaching comet storms? The Northern Lights? Nothing is certain anymore.
(IV) Finally, the Northern Lights themselves, or "Aurora borealis," as the technical term is and thus the title of the image consisting of 6 individual panels. Just as the (rare in our latitudes) sight of the Northern Lights must somewhat pull the ground from under one's feet, here too the impressive dimension of the image makes one dizzy. The horizon line as the last spatial point of orientation has completely dissolved and gives way solely to the dancing vertical lines. Bright lines in dark blue to black. The lines here are again traces of the circular saw's work, but this time not printed, but actually – otherwise used as a printing block, the wooden plate here is the image itself, a relief. Another dimension seems to open up, just as the circular saw "injures" and reveals the surface of the wood. Something bright, inner comes to light. It is interesting that the artist worked on the image on the floor, squatting, kneeling, being on, almost in (!) the image itself. She is the force acting on the surface, like the wind whipping across the surface of the sea. Also noteworthy is the artist's background, who worked for a while as a carpenter and sailor on the tall ship "Sea Cloud". And isn't it precisely with this work as if she were back on the high seas? Sailing can perhaps be compared to the artistic process in that here too the art consists of being understanding of the currents and winds. Not to work against them, but with them. To regard them as colleagues, companions, and to benefit from their forces. In doing so, one can be much stronger, come much further than one ever could alone. "Being in the flow" is not by chance the description for a successful process.
(V) The series "searching for silence," which gives the exhibition its title, differs content-wise and formally at first glance from the others. While previously physical-intuitive gestures from the process determined the image finding, here a technically and conceptually strictly planned approach underlies the images. On the one hand, the medium of analog photography, on the other hand, the "motive": human portraits in the dark, faces, torsos, only sparsely and partially illuminated. What comes into the light is fragmentary, blurred, hardly attributable to the human form anymore. A collarbone, sometimes a nose tip, a blurred face. The out-of-focus forms, in which one nevertheless believes to recognize something, remind in their washed-out black and white of ultrasound images from inside the body, a near distance. But they also seem as if someone had undertaken a research mission into the deep sea, only sometimes the submarine's spotlight sweeps over a light-shy figure. Here again, the sea.
The expression "in See stechen" (to set sail) probably comes from Dutch seafaring language – pushing off from the shore or quay wall with a pole or paddle ("absteken"). So, to set sail means to push off from the shore, to leave the safe harbor and to pick up speed on the open sea. To be ready for the uncertain, it will probably be an adventure. As an artist, one must absolutely be ready for the unknown, but one must also be ready for it as a viewer of works of fine art, if one really wants to come into contact with them. To view an image can also be like leaving the harbor, the familiar, the certain; one pushes off from the security of the mainland. From now on, swaying ground and spray in the face.
"To create means: to emigrate again and again into the dangerous distance of our hearts. We sail out of the harbor against the wind, and return home against the wind."¹
Miriam Albert
1 Hans-Jürgen von der Wense: "Das Nordlicht", p. 33, edited by Valeska Bertoncini and Reiner Niehoff, Berlin 2021