An evening with CFGNY, Kerstin Brätsch, and Contemporary Art Library

SculptureCenter hosts a special evening with Contemporary Art Library to celebrate the release of Kerstin Brätsch’s Contemporary Art Quarterly archive, with an activation by CFGNY and a performance by VIOLENCE. Drinks will be served by KAYA. The Contemporary Art Quarterly archive offers an exhaustive documentation history of Brätsch's work as well as the work of the various collectives in which she has been a core member.

Kerstin Brätsch’s artistic practice centers the idea of painting, oscillating between a conceptual analysis of the medium and a devotion to painterly processes. Her interest in the power of the unseen world, manifest in an interrogation of the occult, is expressed through painting, performance, and collaboration. Brätsch uses painting to question the ways in which the body can be expressed psychologically, physically, and socially. Through this focus on the medium—via myriad aesthetic and conceptual approaches—she is seeking to destabilize and expand upon the very definition of painting. A central subject for her is the relationship between painting and subjectivity, a connection that is softened, subverted, and sometimes parodied in her work. This becomes particularly evident in her engagement with the metaphysical strands of abstraction and the animistic qualities of painting. To question the agency of painting and engage with it as an expanded field, she invites artisanal practices (including stained glass, paper marbling, and stucco marmo) and sustained collaborations into the equation, moving from the personal to the collective in order to question the medium’s largely uncontested history. Brätsch was part of the group exhibition Leopords in the Temple at SculptureCenter in 2010 (in addition to her creative alliances with master craftspeople).

In addition to her creative alliances with master craftspeople, Brätsch founded the collaborative DAS INSTITUT with German artist Adele Röder in 2007. Since 2010, she has been working with the American artist Debo Eilers under the moniker KAYA.

Founded in 2016 and based in NYC, the artist collective CFGNY continually returns to the term "vaguely Asian": an understanding of racial identity as a specific cultural experience combined with the experience of being perceived as other. In addition to using fashion as a readymade, CFGNY’s practice spans mediums such as video, performance, installation, and sculpture, researching the ways in which material assemblage and reproduction play a part in the formation and racialization of such “vaguely Asian” identities. CFGNY is uninterested in representing what it means to be “Asian” in the singular; instead, it encourages the visualization of the countless ways one is able to be in the plural. CFGNY is composed of Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kirsten Kilponen, and Tin Nguyen. Their project at SculptureCenter in 2023 included a collaboration with KAYA.

Contemporary Art Library is the resource of record for documentation of contemporary art. A free, non-profit database of nearly 1 million images, videos, and documents, the Library allows anyone to easily study the work of artists. Their project Contemporary Art Quarterly publishes four deep archives on the histories of important artists to the Library each year.