The City as an Ornament

Diversity is Sandra Rauch’s strength. After her training as a type designer, she studied communications design in Berlin as well as graphic design and painting in Dresden. She therefore prefers to effortlessly incorporate various techniques such as photography, typography, and silk-screen printing in her paintings. She paints on acrylic glass rather than canvas, piling compressed scenes of the metropolises New York and Hong Kong on the front and backside of the glass.

She attaches great importance to glowing, expressive colors, and virtuously works with space and perspective, producing views that resemble a photo or video camera. Trickily, she assembles graphic symbols, neon billboards, and various advertisement typographies along the blocks and urban canyons. Her vibrant city scenes are an especial compression of various experiences.

Sandra Rauch also photographs and researches on site. In the end, a work emerges that describes the act of discovery from memory, charged with visual impressions and imagination.

She condenses an urban district in to a medial experience. Tracing the pulse of the city, she develops a visual network that follows it own rules and gives each metropolis its own character. For her, the city space is a fascinating dialogue of information and typography, colored banners and symbols. Sandra Rauch brings to life places like New York’s Times Square as a dense overlapping tapestry of façades and signets, signs and systems of symbols. These structures build a colorful extract of every day urban life. Her works are also experiments with material, opening access into the world of experience on different continents.   

In Sandra Rauch’s paintings, neon lights gleam and colors are alienated, and yet one believes in the reality of the pictures. She leaves the possibility for interpretation open and allows the viewer access to new patterns of perception, despite coded ciphers in foreign languages, Asian scripts, and pictograms. In the end, her metropolises are an internationally readable tableau and a great invitation to dive into worlds of experience.

Christina Wendenburg