by Dagmara Genda, studio photos by Ryan Molnar // Sept. 19, 2025
For much of her career, Schirin Kretschmann has worked in temporary studios, on residencies, at home or in a train traveling from one place to another. Each change in destination prompted a change in working conditions, to which she reacted by embracing an ethos of provisionality and material instability. And though she has been working out of her Berlin studio for the last 10 years, a peripatetic sensibility still inflects her approach to materials, which she understands more as propositions than media; they are a kind of spatial grammar that give voice to a particular place, most often a museum, but also other locations such as streets, office buildings and public spaces.
Kretschmann works in the field of expanded painting, and treats every exhibition venue as an extended picture plane, whose borders have been penetrated, erased and remade through renegade form and color, as well as the people who are implicitly invited to examine their role in deciding where a “picture” begins and ends. Examples include her spray-painted melting ice sculptures, where brightly coloured paint was released from its disappearing ground, or the slowly spreading stains of leather fat she smears on walls. Her practice extrapolates from the fact that every brushstroke is a trace of no-longer-visible movement and every painting, as any conservationist will tell you, changes over time. In her case, the brushstrokes are footprints, oil stains and spilled paint, all of which testify to the eccentric alchemy of creative thought. In his book ‘On Painting,’ James Elkins identifies the core of painting not to be in its historical or representative functions—attributes that other mediums also have—but in the material of the paint itself. Paraphrasing another art historian, he asks: “What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting?” This is what Kretschmann does. She thinks in painting when she moves through a room, walks through a park, looks at the damaged, textured floor of her studio. I imagine she might ask: “What is the pressure and arc of a footstep?” “What is the frame of a color?” “What is the path of least resistance across this particular bench and concrete floor?”
Elkins notes that artists don’t start with antiseptic canvases, blank sheets of paper or white cubes, at least not in the way that we habitually project emptiness upon these already form- and symbol-laden grounds. Like alchemists playing with abject materials, trying to “brew turds and urine,” artists begin “in medias res, literally in the middle of things: oil, canvas, squalor.” It is from this middle, for example, that Kretschmann makes “damaged” drawings that are in fact traces of her stained, rough studio floor. Using a sieve, she sprinkles graphite powder onto it like icing sugar. She then covers the floor with paper and rubs it down. The graphite is not an addition to the paper, as we might understand a mark placed onto it with a pen or pencil. It penetrates the paper and stains it like a tattoo. The rubbing damages the paper—“injures” it, as Kretschmann often says—to create holes where the floor had particularly large protrusions. The resulting sheet evokes the impression of some sort of filigree remnant of worn-out fabric. This technique, like many others, are refined in her Berlin studio, but they are developed in situ, in the exhibition spaces that are her actual, and by necessity changeable, studios. During our visit, Kretschmann makes reference to Daniel Buren, who made the now somewhat romantic statement that “it is…only in the studio that the work may be said to belong,” which is why, as he also writes, all his work “proceeds from [the studio’s] extinction.” Perhaps in Kretschmann’s case, the studio is repeatedly resurrected through working techniques developed for and then applied to various places. Her method of injuring paper with graphite will later be applied to museum floors that will cause their own texture of wounds and rubbings. And though each place might change, her method introduces a visual consistency that emphasizes the ambivalent relationship between the place of production and the place of exhibition.
Vulnerability is a concept Kretschmann picks up on again and again. She usually talks about it in reference to materials, though the term is unavoidably emotional. In respect to the walls, upon which she often directly works, she understands them as analogous to her own body, an object into which one can inscribe and subsequently scar. To this end, the vulnerability is mutual. The materials she uses are affected and potentially disturbed by the space and its visitors, and the space itself might be damaged by an intervention. Kretschmann’s (semi) permanent installation, ‘Let’s Slip Into Her Shoes’ (2014), in the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart is such an example. Referencing Dieter Roth, who made a career using mouldy substances and whose work is in the museum’s collection, Kretschmann applied rectangles of black shoe polish mixed with leather fat to the walls of a staircase. These picture-sized interventions sunk into the paint and plaster to leave a slow “drip” of indigo-stained oil under them. They also change color with time. One could say that they deteriorate or decay, though they might also be developing, changing, even living. Moreover, the material itself, due to its high oil-content, always remains slightly damp, and thus also vulnerable to touch. This rejection of archival permanence or temporal transcendence, assumed to be the very foundation of timelessly valuable museum collections, can be understood as a critique of the institution as well as art itself. Our greatest treasures might reveal themselves to be nothing more than fool’s gold.
Through the fragile volatility of her work, Kretschmann focuses our attention not onto worth or objecthood, but on the fleeting impossibility of the present moment. During our visit she demonstrates the process of creating deceptively solid, opaque geometric shapes on gallery floors. They are always made in situ by sprinkling a powdery mixture of plaster and pigment over a large surface area. In the studio, however, she uses a sieve to dust a small pane of glass with candy pink powder, which actually represents an exception to her usual ephemeral approach. The dusted glass is later covered with another pane and sealed together resulting in a classical picture that can be framed and hung on a wall. The Ellsworth Kelly-like spatial interventions, on the other hand, can be easily, to use the artist’s term again, injured. Their icing sugar surfaces record every fleeting touch—an errant drip from a skylight window, a visitor’s stumble, a furtive caress when the security guard turns his head. At the height of the COVID pandemic, Kretschmann created a white rectangle of plaster, ‘Blank (I) (2020),’ in the middle of one of the gallery floors of Berlin’s no longer existing Kunstsaele. Though visitor interaction is always an open question lingering in the room, this time the boldness of the public came as a surprise. The rectangle’s delicate surface was aggressively trampled by an audience presumably tired of being told to keep a 2-meter distance from everyone and everything. The artist had to improvise a way to contain the rapidly dissolving piece. She decided to keep the footprints but straighten out the edges, thus framing and highlighting the transgressive movement of the visitors. In a related work at the Kunstverein Hannover in 2017, where the room’s ceiling tiles were removed, placed on the floor and covered with a rectangle of plaster and blue pigment, the audience showed more respect for the work’s boundaries. Nevertheless, at the end of the show staff noticed small traces of fingerprints on the edges of the rectangle, as well as the occasional blue smear in the exhibition space and even on other artworks. Both works, in different ways, became collaborative paintings. They were traces of collective movement across a room. They were also indexes of transgression, a kind material evidence to the boundaries of rigid institutional control.
‘Ten By One’ at PEAC Museum Freiburg takes a subtly different approach to vulnerability, though I can only describe it from the perspective of the past, shortly after the studio visit that happened months earlier. Then, or traveling back to that current moment, now, we observe a carefully built model placed on a table in her studio. It is a view no museum visitor will ever see, but for us, her studio visitors, the floor plan looks like another painting. The largest work in the show, also titled ‘Ten by One,’ consists of a dark grey band cutting through the series of rooms and simultaneously connecting them. It is not affixed to the walls nor does it puncture them. It passes through every doorway and is held up by the tension it exerts on the corners of the door frames through which it passes. Each corner is protected by packing foam, something that one uses in the transportation of paintings or to protect the corners of frames. The tension of the band is visible by how much it presses into the foam, and it’s not negligible. This time the nod to injury is in its prevention. At the same time one might get the sense that the museum is already injured. In the studio, looking down on the model, it looks as if the walls are being held together by nothing more than this heavy line, kind of like the idiosyncratic supports installed over time into crumbling heritage buildings. If taken away or loosened, the walls might topple over one another like a house of cards.
Kretschmann describes the doorways in the model as ersatz paintings through which, I imagine, the brushstroke, in this case the suspended line, runs. She plays with the long-running cliché of the painting as a window to another world by treating the doorframe both as picture and passage, a gesture that is simultaneously undermined by cut, grey doormats that have been cut and placed on either side of various walls. These form a work titled ‘Exit’ (2025), but of course, in a sort of Sartrean twist, they provide none. The implication is that the wall has been built over the mat, or that the doorway has shifted a few meters in another direction—a shift that makes the wall not an exhibition surface, but a part of the work itself while at the same time questioning where the boundaries of the “picture” might lie. Looking at the model from above, one can also imagine the people as pictorial elements, as black dots moving across the surface, accumulating here and there, creating new compositions with their bodies. This movement is reflected in a site-specific video piece called ‘We Are The Robots (V)’ (2021/25) which has already been made for other museum spaces. Before the opening of the show, a self-driving vacuum with a camera on top will be unleashed to roam the space. It will record the ceiling and thus produce a kind of moving geometric abstraction. The video will be shown in the last room of the exhibition on an LED monitor laid on the floor, as a kind of idiosyncratic reflection of the exhibition space itself.
Though Kretschmann reacts to and makes work for a given site, site-specificity remains an inadequate description of her work. Like a Sol Lewitt drawing, for example, her work reacts to its environment without being specific to it, and like a Sol Lewitt, its logic can be repeated in many places and, especially if many of the places are museums, produce fairly similar results. This complicates Buren’s romantic notion of the “truth” of the studio space, and perhaps even of the artwork as having any particular place at all. Kretschmann’s interventions melt, spread or dissolve over time and, in so doing, embrace the ontological instability of the art “object” itself. Fool’s gold, she seems to imply, lies not in the glitz of illusory sparkle, but in the faith in concrete value as such.
Artist Info
Exhibition Info
PEAC Museum
Schirin Kretschmann: ‘Ten By One’
Exhibition: Sept. 21, 2025–Feb. 8, 2026
Opening Reception & Performance: Sunday, Sept. 21; 11am
peac.digital
Robert-Bunsen-Straße 5, 79108 Freiburg im Breisgau, click here for map
