Sine Hansen at Kunstverein Braunschweig

“The characteristics of my production lie in the potential for controlling aggression. Objects conceived this way are carriers for certain types of information. Transformed into signs, objects are projected from their customary surroundings onto a plane where they function in a way that is unusual for them.”
—Sine Hansen, 1970 

This quote comes from a text by Sine Hansen on her own work—a rare document, since the artist showed barely any interest in capturing her artworks in words. As soon as a work was finished, she saw it as existing independently in the world. 

It is only by bringing together different sources, and through conversations with the artist’s daughters—more than 15 years after her death—that we are now able to form a clearer picture of Sine Hansen. It is no coincidence that the first large-scale institutional of her work to be staged since her death is being held at the Kunstverein Braunschweig: Hansen moved to the city to study, attending the Hochschule für Bildende Künste between 1961 and 1966, and subsequently made it her home. 

Until now, only tentative attempts have been made to locate Hansen within the history of the German postwar avant-garde. Her body of work, which predominantly consists of paintings, screen-prints, and sculptures and largely deals with mass-produced everyday objects, is often associated with Pop Art. With her paintings especially, reference is also made to the influences of the hard-edge style, which became popular in the USA in the 1950s and advocated clearly delineated, glowing color fields and geometric forms, without brush marks or blending. While this initial classification makes sense in both general and arthistorical terms, it reveals nothing about the “aggression” Hansen mentions, which might be more poetically described as a seductive and provocative sense of presence. 

The exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig presents paintings from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. On the one hand, it brings to light the conceptual consistency with which the artists remained committed to a reduced and clear formal vocabulary and glowing colors in her series. On the other hand, it also seeks to trace the above-mentioned aspect of seductive provocation. The central focus of the exhibition is on works depicting tools in the form of unusual pliers, which illustrate the conceptual stringency and clarity of Hansen’s artistic practice and trace her stylistic development over time. It is important to mention that the artist’s work is in no way limited to plier motifs, however: alongside these tools, she also depicted numerous other objects in her paintings, all the way up to complex arrangements of entire groups of objects. 

For the exhibition in Braunschweig, the architecture of the upper floor of the Villa Salve Hopses was adapted by redesigning many of the doors and windows using temporary display and wall elements. In doing so, care was taken to ensure that the spatial redesign also reflects the conceptual approach of the exhibition—namely, to offer a better understanding of Sine Hansen and her work. Many of the doorways were closed off with simple wall panels, in order to provide more hanging space for the large-format paintings. This produces a clear sense of changing rhythm in the hallway, with white walls alternating with the gray rear sides of the panels slotted into the door frames. While the paintings are displayed within the rooms, the hallway side of this display features photographs by the artist depicting different social contexts and phases of her life. These two sides of the display reflect how the meager reception of Hansen’s work until now has given way to a renewed interest in her as both an artist and a person. In order to gain better insight into Hansen’s practice and approach to art, this text is accompanied by an interview with her daughters, Imme Sagemüller and Nora Meyer. There are still more doors to be opened in this regard, however, if we are to better understand Sine Hansen’s work and the context of the time she lived in.

The exhibition opens with the paintings Osramkneifer (no. ##) und Ruhrfrühling (beide 1964), which function as a pair. At the bottom edge of the image, Hansen positioned the fulcrum of a pair of pliers with open, rounded arms. In the middle of the upper edge, she placed a light bulb. In Ruhrfrühling, she reverses the direction of pliers and object so that the arms project downward from the upper edge of the image, stopping just in front of rose. Both works are characterized by the juxtaposition of mechanical and breakable objects, and as such even early on exemplified the tension that permeates her compositions, which might be described as their dramaturgical force. At the same time, the specific positioning of the pliers in the paintings gives them the appearance of hydraulic claws like those used on cranes, here engaged in grasping or squashing the delicate objects.

In comparison to Hansen’s later depictions of pliers, the distinct ornamentation of the individual elements here is striking: the different parts of the pliers stand out from one another both in terms of color and graphically, and they appear static in comparison to the sweeping lines that characterize the surfaces of the rose and the light bulb. 

One important group of works, which form the core of the exhibition, are the so-called Spannungszangen [Tension Pliers], which were produced during the 1970s and can be identified as falling into several distinct types. Works like Spannungszange (1974), Schreitende Zange (1975), Grüne Zange (1975), and Liegende (1978) all suggest human poses, as their titles sometimes do. The seductive power mentioned earlier is particularly evident here, strikingly emphasized by the works’ monumental dimensions. Presented in elegant, sweeping lines, Hansen’s pliers recall organic and technical objects alike in their forms, radiating both femininity and masculinity. They bring to mind pin-ups—stylized erotic photos and drawings from the first half of the 20th century, which often reduced female bodies to their prominent curves, such as hips, busts, and buttocks. Such images presumably were and still are found particularly often in workshops – maledominated spaces, that is, and the exact same environment where Hansen’s pliers are located. Some of the pliers are depicted in action, grasping spheres in their arms. While no actual movement is depicted, their idiosyncratic use of color makes the tools appear dynamic and imbued with energy. Each set of pliers appears in front of a monochrome background, with the artist choosing a primary color for the tool’s body that is contrasted with others on its outer edges, which follow the contours of the object. This specific and impressively precise application of paint is the result of hands-on research conducted by the artist. Through an acquaintance at the Technical University of Braunschweig, the artist gained access to a polarimeter. This device makes it possible to visualize mechanical stresses in solid materials using the optical rotation of polarized light.

It is notable how the artist exaggerates the depiction of the pliers by strongly emphasizing their pointed elements. By styling the Spannungszangen as characters, the psychologizing dimension that runs through the artist’s entire body of work appears more clearly than ever in this series. Perhaps these pliers should be understood as self-portraits—or at least as an engagement with the patriarchal structures of the art world, which Hansen inevitably found herself confronted with as an ambitious young woman artist, particularly since she attracted great attention even while still at university, as her daughters recount.

In the late 1970s, Hansen intensified and altered the way she depicted the objects reproduced by the thermal camera. In Rohrzangenspannung (1975), Scheibenkreis (1976), Hakenspannung (1976), Papageienzange (1977), Fischzange (1977), and Generalzange (1977), the tools take up almost the entire space of the canvas. Hansen now used strongly contrasting colors across their entire surfaces, further  strengthening the fluorescent effect of the original thermal images. Within this series, the paintings Papageienzange and Generalzange both illustrate the tendency for psychologization—a sort of  anthropomorphism in depicting objects that conveys an individual character or inner state, making these two works in particular appear like portraits. 

The final group of works presented in the exhibition was produced in the 1990s and is lesser known then the works from the 1960s and 1970s. While the large-format Liebe Glaube Hoffnung (1993) still features recognizable objects, Hansen freed her paintings of any representational functional function at all in later years, devoting herself entirely to color and its potential for producing optical effects. Durch den bedeutsamen Faden verbunden I (1996) and Durch den bedeutsamen Faden verbunden II) from 1996 resemble labyrinths, painted with an almost mechanical precision that makes the surfaces of the canvases vibrate. Influences from the world of digital imagery can seemingly already be observed at this point.

As mentioned at the beginning of this text, the exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig is an initial attempt at bringing the idiosyncratic, subversive, and sovereign work of Sine Hansen into the ranks of the German postwar canon. With its precise balance of controlled “aggression” (to use Hansen’s term) and sensitive formal vocabulary, Hansen’s approach reveals itself to be both unconventional and groundbreaking, making her work relevant far beyond the context of its production alone and allowing it to be effortlessly integrated into contemporary discourse around aesthetics and art.
—Cathrin Mayer, Director and exhibition curator

at Kunstverein Braunschweig
until October 5, 2025

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