Lisa van Sorge, 1993 
Lives and works in Breda (NL)

Contact
lisavansorge@hotmail.com

l.vansorge@tilburguniversity.edu

Artist’s statement (2022)
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 (2023)
My philosophical research focuses on (critical) phenomenology, philosophical aesthetics, and philosophy of art. I mainly focus on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.

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. 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