Founding artist: SABINE SENFT
Coming Full Circle to the Bone in His Throat, 2022
resin, dye, cast iron filings, donut, rose quartz
My record of wonder speaks of some of the amazing cultures I have been fortunate enough to live in: waterlike Zen ripples on a Japanese Enso circle, translucent blue agate slice coloring from Brazil and half a nibbled donut from the United States.
I cut an American donut in half to function as a wall hanger. It alludes to the wonderment of how different life in the US is. Its circular shape echoes the Enso theme of togetherness. The cut symbolizes being cut off from my maternal ancestral line and femininity by the Iron Curtain in post war Germany. I have never met any of my maternal relatives. The donut also alludes to JFK’s famous speech on June 26, 1963 in a defense of democracy that today is ebbing away again like ripples in water. It alludes to fake news practices and distorted facts, that were already in place decades ago when JFK expressed solidarity to Berliners and likened them to the free citizens of Rome but the joke that made the rounds later was about being a jelly donut.
I grew up in Germany during the Cold War with the Iron Curtain firmly in place some 40 km from my birthplace. Germany and Berlin had been violently divided. So had my family. Today, I am exploring the physical and psychological spaces around me wherever I live. I am hoping to find a diverse mode of thinking through our current moment in time. I address identity and social concerns like human agency, assimilation, intergenerational trauma and healing…often through historical or cross-cultural observations. I like to tell a story with my art about the impact we have on the world and people around us and our potential to shape history while we are alive.
This piece, like much of my art, is very personal with a wider geopolitical narrative, especially in the face of the current war with the Iron Curtain and Cold War rising again
It is wondrous how my life has led me full circle to be back in Berlin, once dubbed by the former Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev “a bone in his throat” as it was a free, democratic island surrounded by the Soviet controlled East.
The ripples explore how our words, thoughts and actions impact those around us and spread and how powerful rhetoric and fake news are and their influence n individual and collective human agency.
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Sabine Senft is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice often brings together unlikely, symbolic elements in a single installation. She creates balanced yet poignant works that merge the personal with a wider socio-political narrative and reflect her ongoing investigation of individual and collective human agency.
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She earned her bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at the University of Regensburg (1994) and graduated with a master’s degree in Fine Art and Education in Munich (1995, 1.+2. Staatsexamen). After living and working in Germany, England, Japan and Brazil she settled in San Antonio, Texas.
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Her work has been exhibited at ArtPace San Antonio, The McNay Museum, the Blue Star Contemporary Museum, the Lawndale Museum in Houston and the Museum of Biblical Art in Dallas. Sabine’s latest public art commissions have been installed at the South Dallas Government Center and in the Medical Center in San Antonio, TX. Her work has been reviewed in SCULPTURE Magazine and several other regional and international publications. At present she is working on more public art for the San Antonio Medical Center and lives in Berlin as part of the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum artist residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, in Berlin, Germany.
Senft also works as an independent art program manager for corporate and non-profit art projects.