Inclining towards controlled madness while also surveying the forces to which we may dutifully acquiesce, Sascha Braunig’s painting exhibition, “Poseuses,” at François Ghebaly, vividly replicates matrices of power that one can experience both personally and within the world, particularly if under the umbrella of woman-identifying individuals. Employing at times flimsy and at times impotent female silhouettes, Braunig’s figures, cutouts and outlines of negative space, bend with an immutable and regulatory will in colorful stage-like environments. Causing furor, her use of an amplifying color palette animate her feminine figures to signal a sense of unsettlement. Braunig captures a precise, anxiety-provoking realm: the real acts of conforming to illusions of gender with the hope that they might be unreal. This not only invokes the mimetic relationships we have with our predetermined gender illusions, but also reminds us that gender truths are constructed through sustained performances. Integral to her work is the internal psychological exchange facilitated by her figures, demonstrating that the difficulty lies not in the difference between real enactments and highly socialized constructions, but rather in their shared proximity to each other.

François Ghebaly
2245 E. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA

On view through December 23, 2023