»Our assimilating eye links us with many alien elements and unconsciously combines them with the events of other, earlier glances. Everything that we look at repeatedly and longer than necessary eventually begins to speak within us. We want to hear this inner text, which is almost a self-commentary by our ever-receptive egos—it is the reward for our looking-work..«# Some of them have names, and are called Merle, Eva, or Frieda, but most of the people in Sabine Dehnel's large-format paintings and lavishly staged photographs remain just anonymous girls and younger or older women. Ever since her student days, Dehnel has focused entirely on images of people. The starting point of all her works is always a photograph, mostly taken in a private context. Pictures of friends and family serve as models during a process of transformation and abstraction that passes through several phases. In her most recent works, it is conspicuously pictures of females that predominate, but they are often nameless and faceless at the same time. These women and girls—depicted as head and shoulders or classic heads— refuse to make direct eye contact with viewers. They turn or look away, showing only the back of the head, an averted profile, the shoulders or back. Depending on the turn of the head, chin and cheekbones are just outlines; often trees, branches, and flowers hide part of the face. A striking and recurrent ornamental feature is the thick, generally long hair, which falls softly over the shoulders, or is coiled up, artfully laced with colored ribbons, plaited, or tied up in a ponytail. At first glance, the portraits are disconcerting because they lack an important feature: the subject's facial expression (an expression of mood and personality) remains hidden from the viewer. Dehnel proceeds in similar fashion when her lens is directed at the body. This is also incomplete and reduced to sections, with arms, legs, and head cropped or missing altogether. The astonishing thing is that despite these blatant interventions the pictures are not in the least off-putting. Even in the picture of the young woman in the painting Mai letzten Jahres I (Last May I), which shows her only from the hips down to the calves, the composition looks harmonious. You do not miss the young woman's face for a moment. Surrounded by the delicate fresh green of spring foliage, she looks completely at ease with herself. Her white dress with red dots swirls lightly round her youthful body. Her bright red sandals dangle from her fingers. What we cannot see but immediately supplement mentally are her feet—probably bare—on the mossy forest ground. Daydreaming and self-absorbed, she seems to be wholly at one with herself and nature. The budding, spring-like backdrop of the forest symbolizes the transition from girl to young woman. The six-part Frieda series shows even more limited sections of a strong female upper body in extreme close-up, each time occupying the whole picture frame. The head and arms are cut off, and the rigid, frontal attitude remains the same in all the pictures. The only variation is the patterning on the summer clothing, ranging from colorful stripes via floral to monochrome black. The opulent curves of the body, the décolletage decked out with various necklaces, the tops of the arms and not least the rather out-of-date-looking clothing suggest that the subject is an older woman. The Heimweg (Going Home) series shows a girl seen from behind, again alone in a wood, dressed in a blue-and-white pullover, her hair in a braid, the red strap of a bag over her shoulder. The four parts of the series act as a brief film sequence showing her body turning slightly, gradually revealing her profile. Sabine Dehnel's pictures move in the interstices between reality and fiction, dream and reality. Everything is thoroughly calculated, nothing is left to chance. A particularly multi-layered backdrop that frequently crops up in her most recent works is the motif of a forest, blending irrational and rational elements and generating mysterious stories. The forest—the quintessence of Romanticism, the setting of many wellknown tales and myths, a place of lost children and populated by fairies, witches, and demons—becomes in Dehnel a vehicle of a wide range of feelings. It can appear light and cheerful in the bright light of spring, or convey the feeling of protection and security in the saturated green of foliage. But if pale, wintry light shines through the bare branches, if an impenetrable wall of leafless, closely arrayed tree trunks shuts it off, nature reveals its dark, threatening side. And the viewer is puzzled—why is the young woman hiding behind a tree trunk? Is it a harmless game, or is she looking for protection from ominous forces? Is she lost in the forest? Why is she by herself? Everything is inconclusive. And however open and direct the pictures may seem at first glance, they elude deeper probing. Generally the people in Sabine Dehnel's pictures are by themselves. They look relaxed and wholly at ease—obviously they feel no one is watching. As viewers, we penetrate their world, basically getting very close to them, standing directly behind or in front of them, and try to work out what they are looking at. But we are always denied an answer. Our gaze is directed into a void. We are only quiet observers of a situation we are not part of and which ultimately remains closed to us. Dehnel's trick of omission and cutting inevitably leads to voids, which force viewers back on themselves. Because Dehnel negates the original individuality of the people, room for interpretation opens up in many directions. The pictures are thus of wider import than at first appears, leaving room for the conscious and unconscious mind to work and awaken fragments of our own memory. The nicely calculated ambiguity and ambivalent moods lend the works a magical, suggestive character. They shroud themselves in mystery, and that is their special charm. Every series is self-contained, yet nonetheless they all seem almost imperceptibly linked with each other, as if by a central theme. The pictures are strung together like pearls on a chain, orbiting round the various ages of female life from childhood via adolescence to maturity, and constantly raising the question of female identity. There are allusions to Dehnel's own biography in the works. In particular the choice of colors and materials, the attributes of female fashion, bear witness to her affinity with the zeitgeist of the seventies. Even though it was a period that is enjoying a comeback in the current retro look, it amounts to more than a citation in the artist's work. That was the time when Dehnel grew up, and so for her it represents many memories of her own childhood and youth. The seventies were also a time of radical social change that decisively changed the image of women in particular and their status in society. There is therefore an element of the contemporary and at the same time non-contemporary, since it is obvious how much the image of woman put across here differs from the prevailing distorted images of the female body in the media. Day by day we are confronted with the ideal beauty of a standardized, idealized female body, whether in print or in online media, television or advertising. Body cult, self-dramatization, and self-baring increasingly dominate our ordinary life. Dehnel's work refuses to go along with such intrusions. Her women are inaccessible to the voyeur's gaze. With their vitality, aura, vulnerability, sublime eroticism, and not least their naturalness, they represent a countercurrent to an empty artificiality that is steadily gaining ground. Dehnel's style is unexcited, calm, and subtle. Her pictures connect with the past and make it available to us again. We need to deal with it. Barbara Auer is director of the Ludwigshafen Art association which organised a solo exhibition of Sabine Dehnel 17.11.2006 to 07.01.2007. The text printed above originates from the book «Sabine Dehnel. anderswo / elsewhere».