Lisa van Sorge, 1993
Lives and works in Breda (NL)
Contact
lisavansorge@hotmail.com
Artist’s statement (2021)
Via repetition and seriality, I aim to research and
question the boundaries and possibilities of painting. During the process of repeating a painting or
painterly object, the separate works create patterns and influence and affect
one another. Questions about the works themselves, the impossibility of their autonomy and
the boundaries of a single canvas in relation to the others arise. During my
long-term projects in which the act of repetition takes center stage, I aim to lay bare habitual ways of perceiving and the patterns through which we perceive the world around us.
In the process of bringing together painterly elements with spatial objects in
installations, I question the limits of painting both conceptually and
physically. The eventual emplacement of the objects in a space allows me to research their conditions, when they are subjected to these newly found
relations.
Keywords: Painting, repetition, frames, limits
Philosophical research (2021)
My main research interests are continental philosophy and (critical) phenomenology. I focus on deconstruction, phenomenology, philosophy of art, political philosophy and philosophical aesthetics. I am open to collaborations and other research-opportunities.
I have written my master’s thesis (2021) on Jacques Derrida and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in order to research their
approach to painting and their value for understanding the possibilities of
contemporary painting. In my thesis, I give
an account of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Jacques Derrida’s understanding of
painting to assess the extent to which their theories can be put to work in
order to capture the possibilities of contemporary painting. Contemporary
painting is able to transgress its own conceptual and physical borders, and has
left medium specificity and thinking in terms of essences behind. Painting has
the capacity to question its borders, frames and limits, and by drawing on
Merleau-Ponty’s and Derrida’s insights I argue for my approach to contemporary
painting and its possibilities to question perception, and what we take a
painting to be. Merleau-Ponty brings to the fore the close connection between painting
and perception, and how a painting can question perception. By turning to
Derrida, I challenge Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about what a painting is, as well as
what problematic presuppositions we adhere to in terms of what belongs to the
inside and the outside of a painting, and what constitutes its borders. By
discussing several contemporary painterly practices, I underline how processes of transgressing and
questioning the limits and borders of painting are in each case at work. Both
the embodied working process of the painter and the material object of the
paintings themselves can challenge the presuppositions of painting. Painting
itself can put into question what a painting is, and question habitual manners
of perceiving. In both instances, contemporary painting challenges the
processes of selection and framing from within.
Keywords: Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, contemporary painting, perception, frames