How many colors are reflected by the Bosphorus?
Abstraction, ornamentation and information in the works of Sabine Boehl*

In Classical myths, alongside Narcissus, Apollo and King Midas two figures who are as good as forgotten today, namely the sister Prokne and Philomela were among the figures whose stories were elaborated on during the Renaissance and Baroque to form incisive archetypes for how the visual arts saw themselves. Prokne and Philomela, of whom the Late Roman poet Ovid tells in his Metamorphoses (Met. 6, 413f), were dumb and developed a special weaving technique in order to communicate: They used different patterns and colored glass beads woven into the fabric to create a kind of sign language. If, from today’s vantage-point, the mythical tale of Prokne and Philomela contains clear elements of a pre-history of media theory, structuralism and semiotics, back in 1600 the sisters were considered as exemplars for the greater status to be accorded the art of painting, which now had to be assessed not only fro the point of view of craftsmanship, but also in intellectual and conceptual terms. In the era of the Ut Pictura Poesis (which dated back to the likewise Late Roman poet Horace) Prokne and Philomela embodied the beautiful thought that a painting can be a silent poem and a poem a talking painting.

Sabine Boehl’s picture, which feature tiny glass beads applied to the canvas, oscillate between image and texture, as in the fabric evoked in an ancient myth. So sensually tempting and yet strictly regulated, these works by the former member of Gerhard Merz’ master class are the product of returning to the traditions of art history and forms of ornamental décor and patterns. With bead embroidery, a technique she has practiced ever since her early days as a student, Sabine Boehl gives her pictures a tactile effect for all the stylized forms. While initially the surfaces were defined by an at times strangely dim patina, a satin gleam, the most recent works produced in 2009-10 stand out for the colorful contrasts and strong gloss effects. We can sense here the influence of Islamic systems of decoration, the result of several study trips to Turkey since 2007. It can be seen, for example, in the ornamental images composed as letter symbols such as “Tuz/Seker” (salt/sugar) and is especially pronounced in the series of pictures conceived as a homage to Istanbul and entitled “How many colors are reflected by the Bosphorus?” 

From the very outset, Sabine Boehl has always resorted to the shapes of historical ornaments and the somewhat antiquated look of embroidered images created by the materials used in close combination with the adoption of Modernist compositional principles such as the grid, series, and all-overs. In Sabine Boehl’s works, the differentiation of the internal structure of the smaller formations frequently corresponds to the organization of the entire pictorial surface. In this way, the images not only take up one of the key criteria for the order of ornaments, but also advance the grammatological/structural declination of form as promulgated by artists associated with the Minimal Art movement, such as Donald Judd or Sol Lewitt. The dovetailing of ornament and abstraction, of rich variety and reduction culminates in Sabine Boehl’s oeuvre in the notion of the image as semiotic system: “In the sense of a mosaic, the beads are grasped as individual color data, as colored signs that serve as the modules or work.” The bead language that Sabine Boehl develops transforms the ancient myth of Prokne and Philomela into a poetics of concrete form, a poetics express in the material and shape of the refined textile works at once both haptically and visually.

The technique of bead embroidery Sabine Boehl has developed immediately catches the eye with the way technique and material function together. With great skill, the bead pictures set themselves off from the merely pretty and decorative. With their mixture of dryness and luxury they cite the past glory of a high-end culture of textiles, a domain reserved for the aristocracy and high clergy. They touch on the Oriental fabrics that are decorated almost to the point of overkill and the sophisticated aesthetics of current fashion trends. Boehl’s one-offs are hand-made in a very onerous process. Each bead is sewn individually onto a predetermined position on the fabric. What is important about the production, undertaken initially by her and then soon delegated to an assistant, is to avoid any sense of machine-like accuracy. The idea is consciously not to evenly fill the spaces marked on the fabric with beads of a predefined color. It is the irregularity of discrepancy, the free, almost painterly use of the material (e.g., the ‘impasto’ compression and ruffling of beads) that creates the effect of a hybrid artifact that is image, relief and textile object rolled into one. The physical reality of the reflective material is computed such that the arrangement is now a pixel-like virtual pattern, now condensed rampant almost vegetable-like patches of beads. These sometimes seem fur-like, chalky, mineral, and thus deliberately undermine the genuine decorative function of the glass-bead as a material.

Color, shape and meaning lead in Sabine Boehl’s oeuvre to a statement on the range of abstraction, with highly different historical traditions being considered and synthesized on the so precious-seeming fabrics. In the form of the beads, a dense skein of historical references are sewn into the fabric, the spectrum being immense as research into the antecedents of abstract symbols show. They range from the Classical theory of decorum to semiotics, from cosmological systems of order to the 19th-century grammatology of ornamentation, from Alois Riegl’s Problems of Style to Ernst H. Gombrich’s theory of the ornament, which draws on perception and gestalt psychology. Sabine Boehl’s pointed use of bead embroidery of course also brings to mind a reinterpretation and upgrading of remote, folklore, crafts and gender-specific techniques such as Rosemarie Trockel cunningly presented in the early 1980s with her mechanically produced embroidered images.

For all the visual opulence of the images, Sabine Boehl’s method is affiliated to Concept Art around 1970. Boehl’s historical/structural approach, her interest in generative shapes and patterns and a truly linguistic procedure, her analytical/research-based use of color and the sparing utilization of fabric (for all the glorious feel) all underscore the importance of the artistic idea, the stance. Her early works, which she made while still studying at the Academy of Design in Offenbach, Germany, were already influenced by a conceptual thrust. Back then, she relied on researching and collecting image and then selecting the appropriate ones as the starting point for her dog portraits – embroidered in colored beads. Moreover, she photographed digs she saw and recorded their names. From the archive of material she then chose the essentially trivial images, which actually have a strong tradition in art history: these were then embroidered in highly stylized manner using very colorful beads onto an untreated canvas pulled taut on a stretcher frame. As if personifying the animal portrayed its (at time seemingly eccentric) name, and it doubles up as the title, was included beneath the image on an embroidered framed label. A special role is played in works such as Cardinal Richelieu (1998) or Marlon (1999) the way the dog’s leash is presented, an animated curved line leading from the dog’s head in the middle of the picture across the empty surface to the upper edge. In the piece called Leinen (2000) the leash takes on an independent life and, portrayed as a colorful wound ribbon, winds its way across the entire white surface of the large picture. As an image of linear form bereft of figurative reference, Leinen defines the transition to free, abstract shapes such as Boehl has advanced in her most recent ornamental works. Leinen also shows that for her abstraction as shape liberated from all content is simply impossible, but always exists as a coded symbol that is thus legible and open to interpretation. The ambiguous title Leinen (canvas and leash) not only points to dog collars as the origin of the linear shape, but also to the canvas material of the image, one left visible. And it above all references William Hogarth’s famous Line of Beauty and the related notion of ideal beauty.

Sabine Boehl’s interest in developing abstract symbols and embedding them in an thematic, everyday context of what is clearly popular culture is also evidenced in another larger early work dedicated to the phenomenon of surface and color. At the end of the 1990s she produced a group of now 47 [???] panels covered in nail varnish of the most different colors, from red via yellow to green. In the middle of each monochrome panel (30 x 30 cm) we see in raised letters the manufacturer’s term for the respective color tone, including lyrical creations such as “Snow Rose”, “Hocus Pocus”, “Grey Whisper” or “Golden Wonder”. Arranged as a block of squares as a tableau, on the wall the ensemble forms a modular grid. Boehl refers with this open series of monochrome panels to any number of predecessors in art history, above all to those that grasp color not as the emanation of the sublime but as historically defined construct. Alongside Gerhard Richter’s famous Color Panels, the nail-varnish pictures with their clear semantic qualities also cite conceptual positions such as those of Daniel Buren, Heimo Zobernig or Gerhard Merz. Boehl’s varnish panels dissect the phenomenon and terminology of color/paints in a specific domain. The names of the colors and the materials used converge here in an ingenious way. And it emerges that the color tones produced industrially for the commercial world of cosmetic fashion are related to the history of color theory. With terms such as “Illusion”, “Vanity”, “Virtual” or “Sublime”, the copywriters make use of key concepts from art theory and aesthetics in order to label the spheres of the vague, ineffable and seductive that have always been associated with the appearance of color.

Around 2003 Sabine Boehl started using ancient ornamental shapes as the main theme in her work. A la greque (2003) shows one of the most prominent decorative motifs of Ancient Greek art, a meander bent at several points and running in right-angles lines. Broad lines of white beads with contours of yellowish gold beads form the decorative ribbon named after the long river Maiandros, now in West Turkey. The picture format is again not fully used. Towards the edges, the pattern breaks off irregularly and the naked canvas can be seen, whereby in place the composition lines drawn in pencil are visible. Since the dog portraits, Sabine Boehl has explored staging empty spaces in the image and in the ornamental works this becomes a refined dramatic use of the fragmentary; this is the point where the aspects of perceptual psychology so crucial for the reception of ornaments, pattern recognition and stylistic formal analysis come into play. Ornaments are seldom viewed with the same attention as paintings, indeed many toy with our limited ability to absorb and process visual data. In many instances, pattern and medium meld, surfaces and the shapes they embrace seem to be one and the same. 

The shift from functional décor to image is most vivid in Sabine Boehl’s ornament works when figurative elements (e.g., Medusa’s head or animals or plants) appear within the ornamental repeat. Medusa (2003-4) exemplifies how, when seen in the context of geometrical or vegetable systems of decoration, the figurative symbol reveals itself to be a codified construct generated through stylization and abstraction. Around 2005 Sabine Boehl started making pictures that put the question of the relation between image and representation even more acutely, as she started using ornamental shapes from Arab/Islamic culture, in which a specific set of rules has always applied to representation by image. Owing to the prohibition on representing the human figure, ancient Islamic décor have frequently modified or advanced the meandering line. Interwoven ribbon motifs accentuate the ornamental surfaces with the artistic rhythmical alternation of flowing and stopping. In Boehl’s works, the pronounced volume of the bead work clearly outweighs the sense of surface. For example, Mosul (2005) transfers the décor of an ancient jug found in Mosul, Iraq into the surface arrangement of a large-size canvas picture. Owing to the many, densely positioned glass beads, the repeat of bright gray and white beads (consisting of octahedrons with eight squares arranged as a star in each) resembles silvery shimmering jewels bulging out of the surface. Other pieces made that year, and they include the use of Arabic, floral script (paving the way for the ‘Turkish scripts’) translate the flat system of decoration into raised reliefs.

In the preface to his book on The Sense of Order. A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (1979) Ernst H. Gombrich remarked that usually we do not focus attention on the decorative shapes that surround us. Instead, for us they tend to blend into the background and we rarely do justice to their intricate details. He goes on to say that it is even more rare for us to ask what the point of the exercise is and why humanity has the irresistible urge to expend so much energy on covering objects with dots and spirals, diamonds and tendrils. Sabine Boehl’s transfer of ancient ornamentation into the domain of contemporary art is based on a searching study of the forms that have been passed down to us and on a semiotic view of the world. Tellingly, Boehl’s interest in abstract image vocabularies draws less on the history of abstract art in the 20th century and its propagandist definition of abstraction as a specific style. The recourse to ancient art filtered through the 18th and above all the 19th century thus serves to revitalize an abstract pictorial vocabulary beyond the debates on formalism and ideological appropriation. Sabine Boehl’s beadworks, and in this respect they are comparable with a few other positions among her peers (such as Ivan Morley, David Thorpe or Tomma Abts) seek to reassess pre-Modern art, where figurative and abstract were not opposites and handcraftsmanship was not a taboo. Following on from art historian Timothy Clarke, some claimed in the context of the documenta 12  (2007) that Modernism is our own Classical Antiquity. Sabine Boehl’s beadworks suggest that perhaps the opposite may be true. 

What a stunning image! Surely the image of the century! Seen through the lens of Maurice Jarnoux we see Andre Malraux in 1954, arranging the print proofs for his ‘Le Musee Imaginaire’. Malraux, who has spread out hundreds of illustrations, is gazing at the extensive richness of the world’s cultures, the stocks of his imaginary museum. It is a sea of images and artifacts, of sculptures and details, jumping out at us and attesting to Malraux’ obsession of getting a handle on the diversity of what exists.

After all, it is Malraux who best summarized the paradigm shift of the post-War generation in a ´few, pithy words: “I find myself fin art the way others live in religion.” Nothing could be a more accurate description of what that age sought to achieve by placing the creative potential of humans and cultures at the heart of its explorations. 

Only two years later Alain Resnais painted a marvelous portrait of the National Library in Pari. The film, which documents the library’s relocation, could be read as a way of advancing Malraux’s ‘Musee Imaginaire’ by cinematic means. Resnai’s images whisk us away into the infinite universe of knowledge, into the world of documents and folios, of maps of the world and prints cabinets. As if in a chamber of wonders, the world’s knowledge is spread out before us, extensive and insurmountable. Given these images one finds oneself invariably thinking of Fernand Leger’s remark that modern humans absorb a hundred times as many impressions as did an 18th-century artist. The flood of impressions Leger describes also entails an awareness that the past is always also a part of the present.

The timeless thrust of Leger’s statement is reflected in Sabine Boehl’s fragile works. One might be tempted to speak of images but these pieces, with their bead applications and blank sections are beyond the conventional conceptual world of the image. And this is intended. We can therefore speak of a free space, which, like a cut in a Fontana image exposes ‘terra incognita’, an unknown zone in the zone dividing image from object. It is this zone that keeps all the freedoms at hand and the option open to move with recourse to the past and the wealth of what cultures offer. Without a doubt, the reference to the ISM, to the major schools of the 20th century, can be sensed in many of these works. The turn to the domain of the material is itself revealing. The beads applied in rocaille form geometric patterns with consciously empty spaces that expose the texture of the canvas. They invariably bring to mind the textile oeuvre of an Anni Albers, and even more strongly the coarse rhythm of early Stella works, where the exposed canvas triumphs as a pictorial element. Not a few of Sabine Boehl’s works dig even deeper into the temporal repertoire of the history of art and shapes. We repeatedly encounter a selection of mythological beasts, usually embedded in rampant grotesques, that form the vibrating frame for a world of owls, ravens and carnivores. Often we encounter endless ornamental loops that are placed like a dense network over the mathematically fascinating pattern of the early Islamic Girih tiles, with their infinite reflections of stars and meanders. 

A broad range of associations and inspirational moments come to mind. As a consequence, there are no work groups per se. Sometimes images arise more or less in a sequence of four or five canvases addressing one theme. In-between there are repeatedly one-offs. The crystalline reflection of thousands and thousands of beads immerses the images in the diffuse mist of the intangible. Even where the works enable a view of the pattern behind the beads, the exposed sections of canvas gleaming out like raw material beneath a sea of beads, each element is defined with great precision. More than anything else, it is the manufactured quality, the exact craftsmanship that unnerves the eye. One is drawn inexorably to focus on the process underlying the pictures.

The artist’s conceptual approach to the images dispenses with a sketchbook. Seen thus, there is no ‘premier regard’, no first definition of the idea by pin-pointing it by pencil first. Little in the pictures attests to the artist’s hand at work. Preliminary drawings only exist as regards transposing the motif onto canvas and Boehl destroys them afterwards. One could almost say that he finished images are liberated from the preliminary work. Everything takes place in Boehl’s head. Marcel Duchamp’ aversion to the ‘intolerable smell of turpentine’, and he did not just mean it metaphorically, is reflected here at the conceptual level. The memories we may have of photos of Bacon’s or Auerbach’s studio, where the layers of paint, oil-drenched rags or crusted-over palettes have seized hold of the studio, can in no manner be applied to Boehl’s approach. It is almost as if one should talk of an antiseptic approach that centrally foregrounds the construction of the picture. Doubtless it is the relief-like layer of embroidered beads that is the overall eye-catcher. The interplay of reflected light functions like a projection screen, an attractive background that draws the viewer ineluctably into the depths of the work. In this pictures, a world opens up in which ages and cultures permeate one another, image and font, ornament and abstraction meld. 

Almost all of Sabine Boehl’s picture allude to this wealth of references. A perfect example of this is her new piece “Diamond Dust-Strawberry Fields”. It is almost as if your retinas are being attacked when you first glimpse the intense red pattern of the image. She took her cue here from an ancient Moorish ornament consisting of acute-angled triangles that with their precision seem to have been culled from the stocks of Op Art. The strict beauty of the image is undermined solely in the right bottom corner, where lines of beads that form a floral pattern truly break up the composition. It is no exaggeration to talk here of a grand sleight of hand that turns the piece into an enigmatic entity which exists somewhere between Classical Antiquity and Modernism, as alluded to in the title.

More than anything else, Sabine Boehl’s latest works were created in light of the overwhelming impression Istanbul has made on her. We can almost talk of an inspirational burst triggered by the energetic megapolis. The works are marvelously concentrated and penetratingly intense. They describe the restless endeavor to capture the beauty of the moment and reflect it in images and words. The title of the series, “how many”, refers to the fleeting impressions that we find fixed on the canvas in the form of questions. These are wonderfully poetic notations of ethereal lightness that now take their place on the oscillating monochrome of the canvas. The words link up as if freed of gravity’s pull. To choose just one example from the canon of the series: “how many rose petals left their spirit transformed into rose water?” A vibrant deep red based on a square. Not least the “all over” of the red bead relief can be read as an homage to the pioneers of color field painting. The legibility of the empty spaces framed by fragile bead borders that then form the letter is essentially unintentional. We can clearly discern the influence of Islamic calligraphy here. But while the hand of the calligrapher generated letters from images, the letters in Sabine Boehl’s works turn into the images. Like the words carved on archaeological finds, we have to expose them letter by letter to find the added poetic value they have.

Even the role of art as the visualization of a stance toward life and the world as championed by Albers at Black Mountain College does not do justice to this approach. The piece go beyond the individual representation of the present as considered by many to be the status quo. As in physics, the artist seems here to be searching for a universal formula that encapsulates all the allusions and references. Beneath the glittering reflections of the sea of beads unfathomable images appear, sending the viewer crashing into a vortex of present and past, myths, ideas and references. We can speak here of a catharsis of the eye that sensitizes us to taking an undistorted view of how we address the past, in fact enables us to do so in the first place. 

Let us not forget that the unmistakable character of Sabine Boehl’s images results above all from the fact that she has found a way out of the dilemma of the zeitgeist and avoiding a mere repetition of what previous generations attempted. Sol Lewitt once captured this with great trenchancy when he said: “Every generation renews itself in its own way; there's always a reaction against whatever is standard.”