Sascha Braunig paints people who don’t exist, figures assembled from clay models and lighting rigs, then rendered onto canvas with a precision that feels almost clinical.
The skin seems to generate its own light. The patterns behind them pulse and breathe, creating almost a visual illusion.
Her work lives at the edges of portraiture, drawing from surrealism, op art, and Dadaism without fully committing to any of them. Checks and herringbones bleed into faces. Surfaces carry a quiet psychic weight, like something is about to shift but never quite does.
The process is part of the spell. She sculpts her subjects before she paints them, with physical models that let her control the light, the shadow, and the strangeness.
What ends up on canvas feels invented and inevitable at the same time.
Born in British Columbia, trained at Cooper Union and Yale, working now in Portland, Maine. Her paintings have been shown at MoMA PS1, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the New Museum Triennial.
Nobody real is depicted here. That turns out to be exactly what makes them so hard to forget.
Images © Copyright Sascha Braunig.
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