Artist: Katja Schenker

Mitterrand presents French Vermilion, a solo exhibition by Swiss artist Katja Schenker, whose practice unfolds across performance, drawing, sculpture, and installation. For more than two decades, Schenker has explored the relationship between body, matter, and space, often working with natural materials whose sensory qualities intersect with spatial and temporal dimensions such as context, scale, and transformation.

Working from themes of corporeality and bodily perception, Schenker investigates spaces that she both occupies and generates. Physical action frequently becomes the starting point of form: materials such as concrete, pigment, or textile are subjected to movement, pressure, and friction, allowing gestures to leave visible traces.

The exhibition brings together works that extend this investigation across different mediums. The video dress (Chengdu) documents a performance originally conceived in collaboration with Zurich- based fashion designer Julian Zigerli and first presented during a fashion show before being adapted to institutional contexts. In the work, the artist wears a rigid concrete structure suspended from her shoulders, whose solidity gradually fractures through movement.

The drawings from the series auslaufen, produced during the artist’s residency at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome, unfold in spiraling lines traced in a single continuous gesture, generating spaces that oscillate between interior and exterior. The paintings from the series Could Be You, Still introduce intense vermilion tones, evoking both the material presence of pigments and the corporeal dimension that runs throughout her work.

Moving between gesture and structure, resistance and transformation, Schenker’s works suggest that form is never fixed but emerges through processes in which the body becomes both a tool and a site of inscription. Schenker will also present a solo exhibition at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich from June 4 to September 6, 2026.