„In spite of ourselves
We’ll end up a’sittin‘ on a rainbow
Against all odds
Honey, we’re the big door prize
We’re gonna spite our noses
Right off of our faces
There won’t be nothin‘ but big old hearts
Dancin‘ in our eyes.“
(John Prine feat. Iris DeMent, In Spite of Ourself, 1999)

“When logic and proportion
have fallen sloppy dead”
(Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit, 1967)

When the logic and proportion of familiar objects no longer apply, there are usually few new prospects for them to function in the cosmos of our everyday lives. These are items you find in multitudes—not just by the roadsides of North America or on abandoned plots of land in Massachusetts. They usually yield to the course of our daily rhythms and form the relics of a past life. Silent protagonists, they only rarely catch our attention in a momentary glance. A moment which recalls the presence of their aura, albeit in a slightly displaced version. It is this small shift of perspective in Sarah Braman’s sculptures that makes the things of the banal and chaotic world around us become poetically alien while still retaining a familiar feeling.

As objects, they distance themselves from our world by being elevated on plinths, pedestals, and legs, whose formal raptures centre them in contrast to their geometric forms. It seems as if they, like their function, have changed their status once again. In spite of their shortcomings, or because of them, they now give us the chance to lose ourselves in their prism-like refractions of everyday life. In doing so we immerse ourselves warmly and powerfully in the self-determined contrasts of purple color fields, whose harmoniously luminous moods grasp us like a vision of their past.

She leads us deeper into the sculptures’ interiors, whose powerful centre combines the transformative potential of color effects with subtly refining readjustments of our perceptions. In it, they break again and again and humorously grasp the violet twist of a respectful homage to Mark Rothko’s color field painting on the seat of an orange pillow. If we now distance ourselves more, then the sculptures take on a different light. As if the spectral colors of their external glass pieces have transformed into their own luminous shadows, they vigorously question the figuratively inscribed opposition of right and wrong—of flaws and uniqueness.

It is these curiosities of the mundane that Sarah Braman shows us in the course of her first German solo exhibition: the subtle mood, which ensconces itself between the banal and the spiritual; a chance to immerse yourself into the universe of the work through the associative feelings of color effects; and the chance of a second life for the objects, which lies humorously hidden under the surface of our everyday existence.