Frauke Dannert

Collage und Raum

Of Collages and Spaces

Frauke Dannert’s (b. Herdecke, 1979; lives and works in Cologne) formal idiom is based on the creative technique of the collage. Working with found and collected materials—from scans of plants to photographs of architecture—the artist creates the delicate shapes of dancing, winding, precariously balancing elements she arranges in varying (visual) spaces, on support media such as paper, raw cotton, or the blank wall. Her collage pieces straddle the divisions between organic and architectonic, between real and imaginative spaces, unlocking a space of associations, not unlike cloud formations in which we can identify an unending stream of shapes. Overlaying projections and colorful rugs on the existing architecture, she defamiliarizes the beholder’s experience of the space: the optical illusions of the collages extends, into the third dimension.

The artist’s second monograph combines works made since 2016 with new series of graphite paintings that meld her collage technique and her expansive gestural approach. In her essay Cuts in Space, art historian Vanessa Joan Müller discusses the artist’s characteristic methods as well as paradigmatic works. Dannert’s first book, also published by DISTANZ Verlag, came out in 2016.