Soft Skills

New work by Sabina Oehninger presented at Comfort Station

Soft Skills


Absurd spatiality, comfort, and optical illusions make way for a reflective flatness, while logic escapes your favoring senses.


With Soft Skills, Sabina Oehninger’s new body of work, terry cloth (the common bath towel) has been collaged anew. Using a set of rules that the viewer may never quite understand, but immediately feels, one is intrinsically “touched” by their mesmerizing qualities. The works dance in front of you as they grow, they gain weight, stretch, fluff their colors, and reject the functionality of their origins. Each piece radiates impulsively with its own tone and constructive cohesion. Some are moody, some energetic, some perhaps too serious?


As a group, or as individual works, they share a newfound space, a fuzzy kind of syntax; a guiding light for their formal arrangements, which are both curious and warm. When you come near, a familiarity is already at play. You may understand the material gesture, but what about their divergent vocabularies? These works charmingly taunt you to rearrange your inner images, first with your mind’s eye and then with your mind’s skin.


Sabina Oehninger is an artist from Lucerne, Switzerland, and is currently the resident artist for The Lucerne Atelier Chicago program that is part of the Chicago Sister City exchange.


sabinaoehninger.ch


Sunday, July 9, 2023


If it rains > Rain date, July 15


10 a.m. – 6 p.m.

at Comfort Station (outdoors)

Free

Comfort Station

2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.

Chicago, IL 60647