Poetics of the fragment (installation view), day01. Sydney/Eora
Poetics of the fragment (installation view), day01. Sydney/Eora. With Katherine Bradford (centre) and Heidrun Rathgeb (right).
Heaving bosom, wrinkled sea, 2025. Oil on canvas, 26.7cm x 41.5cm
Come in. Get out, 2025. Oil on canvas, 45cm x 52cm
To you, 2025. Oil on canvas, 54cm x 43cm
Little breath, 2025. Acrylic, collage and graphite on canvas,16.5cm x 16.5cm
day01. is pleased to present Poetics of the fragment, an exhibition of three artists, in three different places, united by their
interest in dreamlike imagery that elevates moments of the everyday. The works of Elena Papanikolakis and Heidrun Rathgeb concretize and convey fleeting experiences rooted in place. Papanikolakis finds moments of profundity in seemingly banal images from old books and magazines. She sometimes redacts sections of text so as to uncover unconscious language in otherwise prosaic materials. Other elements of Papanikolakis’s ever-expanding archive of images give rise to paintings. One of a birthday cake, To You, exemplifies the kind of pronounced ambiguity of meaning and reference characteristic of her work. For, in addition to a cake, its central form also resembles a mouth agape, the stylized ridges that ring the ovoid form being evocative of both frosting and teeth.
interest in dreamlike imagery that elevates moments of the everyday. The works of Elena Papanikolakis and Heidrun Rathgeb concretize and convey fleeting experiences rooted in place. Papanikolakis finds moments of profundity in seemingly banal images from old books and magazines. She sometimes redacts sections of text so as to uncover unconscious language in otherwise prosaic materials. Other elements of Papanikolakis’s ever-expanding archive of images give rise to paintings. One of a birthday cake, To You, exemplifies the kind of pronounced ambiguity of meaning and reference characteristic of her work. For, in addition to a cake, its central form also resembles a mouth agape, the stylized ridges that ring the ovoid form being evocative of both frosting and teeth.
Papanikolakis is drawn to the poetics of the fragment, what a sliver of something can suggest or draw our attention to. Readymade compositions in found images leap out at her. Her edits to these—including sometimes to text—with painted additions and augmentations allow her to use the platform of an existing image to trigger certain feelings. This brings the finished work into an orbit with her personal experience, and by extension, to the viewer’s. Because Papanikolakis relies on something akin to Roland Barthes’s punctum as a logic for selecting and riffing off of a given image, with the logic established in the collages extending to her paintings, which may or may not have collage elements.
Rathgeb immerses herself in the quietly beautiful world around her home on Germany’s Lake Constance. Her penetrating analysis of her daily experience locates profundity in apparently quotidian moments with family, as well as in the familiarity of her home and the surrounding landscape. For example, a diminutive painting of the view out of a window ajar, Towards Rocciamelone, evokes the Nabis painters Bonnard and Vuillard with its close-valued tones and the organization of the composition into vertical bars that partition the painting’s surface and orient the viewer. The cropping of the image emphasizes our imaginative dreamlike travel out into the landscape, as Rathgeb ushers us through the gap in the window out towards a distant mountain peak.
Central to Rathgeb’s practice is prolific sketching from observation, with her sketchbooks providing the basis for her paintings. This practice allows her to transcribe quick impressions from nature, daily experience, and even when watching certain films. There is a distinct window of opportunity, whereby an impression, once transcribed, must settle enough to be legible and translatable into a painting, but too much time cannot pass, otherwise the sharpness of the impression dulls, and the painting is lost. There is some- thing cinematic about Rathgeb’s work, in how it captures a sense of narrative unfolding, with the moments she captures feeling pregnant with possibility.
A final addition of a work by Katherine Bradford underscores the interest shared by Papanikolakis and Rathgeb in the everyday. Bradford’s tonal painting in deep blues and purples sutures together three views of the same female swimmer. Part objects, such as breasts and a cropped face, telegraph the experience of immersing oneself in the ocean off the east coast of the United States where Bradford spends much of her time.
The viewer is invited to explore and experience these very different locations by being transported by the work of these three artists.
–– Alex Bacon, Curatorial Associate at the Princeton University Art Museum and Art Historian based in New York City & London.