“LE POSSIBLE”, From the series Broken Heart. 1980. Collage, 196 x 140cm. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers Berlin London

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“WENN MIR’S IN DIE THEORIE PASST…”, From the series Broken Heart. 1980. Collage, 196 x 140cm. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers Berlin London

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“CE N’EST PAS UNE IMAGE JUSTE…”, From the series Broken Heart. 1980. Collage, 196 x 140cm. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers Berlin London

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view of the exhibition “Broken Heart” at Sprüth Magers Gallery. 2010

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“BROKEN HEART II”. 1990-1995. Mirror, steel, wood. 79 x 270 x 45 cm

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ASTRID KLEIN is a German painter and sculptor who has been working at integrating text into her paintings for over three decades. In 1972, before she had even started her degree in Cologne (1973-77), she began to write several texts which she later printed onto handmade paper. The topics of her own texts, as well as her later use of other textual sources, bear witness to her thoughts on literary, aesthetic, philosophical and scientific writings. Her paintings, collages, works of photography and installations created since 1978 question, deconstruct and renew the relationship between image and text.

Since the beginning of the 90s, she continued these intense discussions also in her large format neon sculptures and light installations. The form and the typeface of the text play as important a role in the works as the content. The overlay, blurring and accentuation can be read as the archeological layers of our thinking and our perception, of memory and oblivion, of what we suppress and what is subconscious.

The large format works of the 1980 series Broken Heart (see above) use excerpts of text from German writer ARNO SCHMIDT’s work Zettels Traum (1970) in relation to the representation of women in cinema and photonovels from the 60s and 70s. KLEIN has called herself “a feminist by genetics” and was fascinated by the power of the female in the films of John Cassavetes, Jean-Luc Godard and R.W. Fassbinder.

The sculptures BROKEN HEART I and BROKEN HEART II (1990/5) contain mirrors that have either been shot at or have been smashed with a hammer. The cracks mean that the reflections of the surroundings can only be viewed as fragmentary or deformed.

Impressive and fascinating!