Hardly any artistic category has changed as much in recent decades as that of sculpture: hardly any subject simultaneously ignores conditions, academic rules, styles and cultural guidelines in equal measure as much as it uses and reflects them. Sasha Auerbakh represents this unrestricted freedom in artistic thought and action. From 2008 – 2011 she studied at the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia in Moscow. There, a daring young generation is reinventing Russian art together with teachers such as Sergei Bratkov and Ekaterina Degot. In 2018, Auerbakh completed her training in Heimo Zobernig's class for Textual Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Sasha Auerbakh's artistic universe is deeply rooted in the conceptual; it is hard to imagine without the philosophy and cultural analysis of the Moscow Conceptualists of the 1980s and 90s, from Ilya Kabakov to Andrei Monastyrsky. The questions of that time, about collective authorship and the total art work [Gesamtkunstwerk], are also questions that the young artist asks herself today. Auerbakh has an unheard-of sensibility for the potential of material: steel, sheet metal, plaster, ceramics, epoxy resin, silicone, paint. Surfaces range from powder coating to gallium, a rare metal that liquefies easily. Work and inspiration are linked to everyday life, a connection that results in unpredictable, often comical objects that are convincing in their absurdity.

The two works Kebab and Lollipop (2017) initially celebrate the sculptural perversion of junk food. While the titles are literal, the works also speak a symbolic language: intense, almost extreme materiality on one side, and on the other, a bit of psychoanalysis – a sphere filled with dirt and feather is penetrated by a chopstick, and camouflage – a kebab, recognizable by its silhouette, becomes a sculptural granite ornament through a trompe l'oeil finish and its position in space. The works feel analog, and appear to come from a world where the internet doesn’t yet matter. And they feel animated, as if there is something inside them: a world, somewhere between Richard Artschwager and David Lynch.

Brigitte Huck, 2020 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)