Join us for the launch of artist Sascha Braunig’s Lay Figure at Printed Matter Chelsea. Lay Figure documents almost forty new and recent works by artist Sascha Braunig exhibited at Oakville Galleries, Ontario, in 2022. The book includes an essay by curator Frances Loeffler and the transcript of a conversation between Braunig and artist Lucy Kim.

Exercises in color, form, and illusion, Braunig’s works cite an artistic lineage that stretches from the Pictures Generation through to the Chicago Imagists and horror-movie practical effects. Her sometimes barbed, tubular, netted, or neon-lit forms speak of many of the tensions of the current moment, such as being a subject within the grid of digital or gender systems.

In the exhibition, the artist brought together new and recent paintings and drawings based on the compositional motif of figures engaged in conflict with a dress-like structure. These works use material qualities to analogize an immaterial idea: the feeling of struggling with a system more powerful than you, in which you are also deeply entangled.

Also included in the exhibition was a display of the three-dimensional models she builds and uses as visual aids in the making of each large painting. Because of this observational painting practice, Braunig sees her work as being linked to the academic 19th-century painter’s use of the “lay figure,” a jointed doll, not quite to-scale, that artists used as a stand-in for a live model in the studio. Lay Figure, the title of the show, refers to this historical practice, but the artist extends its meaning to the schematic wiry figure that recurs in her recent work. Braunig imagines the lay figure coming into its own life, pushing against a system in which it is also embedded and resisting its status as the inanimate muse in patriarchal painting’s history.

Sascha Braunig (b. Qualicum Beach, BC, Canada, 1983) lives and works in Portland, Maine. Braunig was awarded a studio residency from the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in 2016 - 2017, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award in 2016, and Macdowell Fellowships in 2023 and 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include Lay Figure, Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2022); Lay Figure, François Ghebaly and Magenta Plains, New York (2022); The Crease, Office Baroque, Belgium (2018); and Free Peel, Foxy Production, NY (2017). Past solos include Bad Latch, Atlanta Contemporary (2017); Shivers, MOMA PS1 (2016); and Torsion, Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway (2015).

Triangle Books is a Brussels based independent publisher, founded by Olivier Vandervliet in 2013. We produce and distribute books and limited editions made in close collaboration with artists, institutions and galleries.