THE BALANCE

THE BALANCE
2020/2025
Paper cut on handmade laid paper
70 × 50 cm, framed

The Balance is based on an engagement with ornamental pattern books from the early modern period. The formal source of the work can be found in the Berliner/Egger collections (Ornamentale Vorlageblätter), where it is attributed to an Italian master and dated to around 1540. The copper engraving is part of a series and is described in the commentary as a “paraphrase of the Diana of Ephesus.”
The “Diana of Ephesus” is considered an archaic fertility figure whose multiply articulated body stands for abundance, sustenance, and cyclical order. In early modern ornamentation, this figure functions less as the bearer of a specific mythological narrative than as a formal image reservoir—one that is continually reactivated through variation, fragmentation, and transfer.
For The Balance, I isolated exclusively the central figural motif from the historical source and realized it as a paper cut at a significantly enlarged scale. The work deliberately dispenses with the ornamental context of the original and focuses on the body as a carrier of meaning. The figure is created through a manual cutting process with a Japanese knife, in which the body is released from the paper without being modeled or supplemented.
Along the cut edges, the paper fibers rise and remain visible. They mark the physical intervention into the material and lend the figure a fragile, almost corporeal presence. Myth appears here not as a narrated or depicted form, but as a structure that is uncovered through the act of cutting.
This translation shifts myth from a narrative to a formal level. The Balance understands myth not as a story, but as a visual archetype that persists across centuries through repetition, transmission, and transformation. The female body thus becomes visible as a historical repository of knowledge—situated between fertility, projection surface, and inherited visual order.
The work’s calm, frontal presence stands in tension with the fragility of the material. Balance emerges here as an unstable relationship between the adoption of historical visual forms and their contemporary reinterpretation.

The work was shown as part of the group exhibition “Goldrausch. Golden Growth Together” in Zurich (see under “Group Exhibitions”).