Katie van Scherpenberg Brazilian, b. 1940

In the 1990s, Katie van Scherpenberg initiated another key series of works which was also prompted by a personal object: a small painting by Romantic German artist Anselm Feuerbach which had been carried across continents by her family in their many moves from country to country. This painting, physically deteriorating in the humidity of the Amazon, became a kind of micro-academy for van Scherpenberg, not only because it provided an unbroken and familiar lineage back to the great tradition of European painting, but also because she was able to observe its instability in its new physical environment of the Amazon. Watching the acceleration of decay in the painting’s surface provoked a fixation on the necessarily temporal nature of art, and the futility in attempting to fix an image in materials that themselves are part of the natural world.

In some works in the Feuerbach series, sheets of metal (copper or silver) are applied to the surface of the canvas and the artist uses a variety of solutions (often using salt, vinegar, or urine) to create different chemical reactions. A contemporary meditation on the experience of the sublime, the volatility of the environment and the futility in mastering it is expressed through the actions of painting itself.