Every person, every animal, every plant, every thing has a surface, the skin, and therefore a relationship to this material. In her equation, Schrenk equalizes our largest organ with its material: leather. Both are equally vulnerable, scraped by scratches and wounds and also marked with numbers in dark times.
Abstract at first glance, SCHRENK condenses everyday materials by selecting “poor” skin from animals that does not meet the absolute standards of perfection of the luxury goods industry, painting it, tattooing it and/or confronting it with relics from the meat industry or other industrial finds that can be associated with fetish objects. “In the apparent absence of anything human, the artist exposes what is inherent in all life: vulnerability and longing.”
“After processing by cooking, treatment with acid, seams, drawing, tattooing, treatment with a combustion flask or even intentional contamination, the animal skins are stretched. Now you can see the life structures of the organic basis inscribed in the leather. The artist tattoos lines and burns drawings from art and natural history: from the Renaissance and the beginnings of modern medicine to diamond patterns that are reminiscent of Picasso’s Harlequins. Boa feathers are affixed or introduced into deflated balloons and biomorphic casts. Each skin is archivally inscribed with the respective product number, which provides information about the supplier, salt content, gender, weight, batch and buyer. In this way, the body becomes flat and at the same time the image becomes a body that projects into the space, intervenes and questions.”
Elisabeth Fiedler on the exhibition in the Universalmuseum Johanneum Graz, 2024
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