b. 1976 Hamburg, Germany

Kerstin Brätsch’s gregarious practice moves fluidly between mediums and between individual and collective practice. Brätsch creates strange hybrids of painting, design, and performance. For instance, her large-scale oil paintings can be used as backdrops for her staged actions, her sculptures can serve as distribution nodes for various ‘zines and Xeroxed publications, and her poster works can function as remixes of or advertisements for her paintings. Brätsch further expands her practice through her collaboration with other artists and performers as part of the collective DAS INSTITUT and the performance group It’s Our Pleasure to Serve You. This kind of decentered approach to art making, which might have indicated a creative schizophrenia in other eras, is typical not only of Bratsch’s work, but of many of her contemporaries, who view art not as a static set of constructs, but as an opportunity to produce relationships, both between mediums and amongst themselves.