Franziska ReinbotheLaura SachsDesire

Desire

Longing, an intimate, sometimes painful desire.
Desire, a strong wish, an inner need.

Franziska Reinbothe and Laura Sachs share a sustained interest in the conditions of painting. Both approach the image through its elemental components: fabric, colour, surface, material, and the technical and formal relationships between them.

Their works emerge from a precise engagement with material. Colour is not merely a means of representation, but has a physicality and presence of its own. Fabric or canvas are not simply a support, nor are the surface a neutral boundary. Rather, both artists investigate how these elements respond to one another and how an image takes shape through their interaction.

In this process, painting repeatedly exceeds its own surface and moves towards the object like. In Franziska Reinbothe’s work, the canvas itself becomes the site of intervention. It is opened, cut into, or altered in its material structure. Laura Sachs, by contrast, pushes paint through the fabric, turns the image over, and continues working on both sides of the surface. Front and back, surface and body, image and object begin to shift into one another.

Yet from this precision, something emerges that cannot be fully planned: a pleasure in the image itself. In the new works presented here for the first time, this sensual dimension comes more clearly to the fore. Colour is allowed to overflow, forms to expand surfaces to become opulent.

Desire does not describe an opposition to precision, but perhaps its very consequence. Control can give rise to freedom; accuracy can give rise to excess. The pleasure of material, colour, and process becomes an essential part of the work.

Beauty, in this context, is not understood as decoration or as something added to the work. It emerges from the intensity of attention, from the relationship between material, colour, form, and surface, and from the experience the work creates for the viewer. In this sense, the exhibition also resonates with Agnes Martin’s thinking about beauty and joy. For Martin, beauty was not simply a visual quality, but something connected to perception, attention, and an inner experience that could be released through the work. A similar tension can be felt here. Precision and restraint do not limit pleasure but create the conditions from which it can emerge.

The image is allowed to be beautiful, not because beauty has become an end in itself, but because pleasure no longer needs to remain hidden within the process of making. It can become visible in the finished work itself.

Desire is not directed only towards a work that does not yet exist. It is already present in the act itself, in making, discovering, altering, and continuing.
Desire is the first joint exhibition by Franziska Reinbothe and Laura Sachs at Galerie Laetitia Gorsy.

Franziska Reinbothe, born in East Berlin in 1980, studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst). From 2024 to 2026, she served as a visiting professor, heading the Painting and Graphic Arts class. She is currently the recipient of a printmaking fellowship awarded by Hamburger Griffelkunst e.V. at Saalpresse Bergsdorf. Her work is regularly exhibited in Germany and internationally.

Laura Sachs, born in Darmstadt in 1985, initially studied philosophy and art in Frankfurt am Main before enrolling at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2013. With a background in painting, she continued her studies in the sculpture classes of Hubert Kiecol and Gregor Schneider, graduating as a Meisterschülerin (master student) under Schneider in 2018. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including at K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf. She lives and works in Berlin.