Sandra Lauterbach
by Peter Frank
Sandra Lauterbach is quite self-consciously a fabricator, working in a medium (or confluence of media) that requires intense and varied manual application. The results are invariably abstract, given her investment in craft and construction; but they bear visual information that directly references the “real world” – in this case not just the world Lauterbach observes, but the world that she documents in an ongoing project of witness, attestation, and recall. Working primarily with quilting techniques, Lauterbach moves between play and gravitas, delighting in the cleverness of human achievement when not contemplating its cruel absurdity.
Lauterbach’s personal remembrance project, the sober vein that runs through an otherwise jocular aesthetic, speaks through her own family’s history on behalf of the hunted and displaced. By sheer luck both her parents were away from their native Poland at the time of the German-Russian invasion; they thus survived, but were suddenly displaced. Knowing this story, Lauterbach has mused on the direr fate of other Central and Eastern European Jews – and by extension, other (especially modern) victims of war and persecution. Her presentation and coordination of imagery pertinent to the stories she recounts are evenly and thoroughly presented, as befits someone long involved with the legal profession. But this relative dispassion only underscores Lauterbach’s dolorous message of protestation and depiction of endurance.
The greater part of Lauterbach’s oeuvre is designed to delight the eye even as it challenges the artist’s own hand. In effect, she puts her manual skills to the test by allowing them free reign over a range of colors, forms, and materials. Her art comes directly out of her hands, even fingers, and relies on the intricate interaction of diverse textures and colors. These objects are clearly not utilitarian, but in their very substance they allude to clothing and household.
This allusion figures prominently in the work Lauterbach currently pursues, an ongoing, informally related but similarly conceived and fabricated sequence of wall-hung objects poised between recent abstract, especially American, painting and sculpture (e.g. Frank Stella, John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg) and the piecemeal stitching of homemakers and hobbyists. This allows Lauterbach reference, even access, to a broad range of material sources grounded both inside and outside the studio, amplifying the collage aesthetic that operates across boundaries of “high” and “low” art. The visual associations exposed and invented by this patchwork approach – carefully composed but energetically conceived – establish their own polyglot identities as the diverse elements clash and coordinate with one another. In this regard Lauterbach takes the modernist implications of the collage aesthetic through a kind of post-modernist disinflation, a feminist trajectory that reasserts improvisation, intimacy, love of pattern, and the human hand into the otherwise rarefied realm of abstraction.
In composing – or, more accurately, accumulating and conforming – her source elements into self-possessed artworks, Lauterbach makes sure that, in each of her pieces, her diverse sources and references at once distinguish themselves clearly from their vastly dissimilar neighbors and hug them close, producing what seems a visual cacophony but ultimately resolves into jangling, effervescent harmonies. Lauterbach’s overall compositions rely as much on the vigorous and hilarious mismatches of her elements as they do on her imposed structures. It is at once a collage technique, a painterly modality, and a wry, almost parodic homage to a folk-based tradition of artistic production.
In a sense, Lauterbach is making a political statement with her fanciful works just as she is with her documentary works; only the statement itself is different. By working with materials and techniques associated with domestic life and women’s practice, Lauterbach argues for the full validation, as fine art, of women’s creative work in general. Composing intricate, eccentric, elaborate objects out of decorative substances – printed patterns, brightly colored threads, and the like – she demonstrates the aesthetic sophistication of her métier, realizing a highly distinctive body of work in the process. Her work, sprightly and unpredictable, advances Lauterbach’s feminist premise rather than the other way around.