Michaela Sanson-Braun

Alluding to ideas, systems and experiences, my work, across all media, aims to articulate complex ideas about how we exist and understand the world around us.

Michaela Sanson-Braun

As a painter, Michaela Sanson-Braun explores the situational nature of painting, deploying it as much on canvas as in sculpture, installation, collage, drawing, photography and video. Drawing on the history of art and the vagaries of life, the artist evokes both the beauty of everyday life and the precariousness, fragility and upheaval inherent in the world. With humor and irreverence, she questions the conventions and clichés associated with painting, deconstructing them to reveal new dimensions and go beyond the simple materiality of the canvas. Michaela Sanson-Braun appropriates, copies and reuses heterogeneous elements from different contexts, provoking an offbeat dialogue. Her cheeky, poetic works play with the codes of classical art such as painting and its genres (landscape, still life, portraiture), and juxtapose different aesthetic canons from figuration to abstraction. Michaela Sanson-Braun creates visual collisions where the cheap and the so-called tasteful domestic, the pastiche and the ornamental, the intimate and the trashy intertwine. The artist hijacks the aesthetic hierarchies of the so-called major and minor arts, never ceasing to blur the boundaries between the ancient and the contemporary, between the sketch and the finished work. With works that oscillate between seriousness and lightness, that are also critical and playful spaces, Michaela Sanson-Braun invites a renewed social and aesthetic reading of our world.

Peaches and Cream consists of fragments of ancient sculptures and deliberately imperfect copies of architectural elements old and new, subtly blended with details of works from the museum's collection and architecture. The whole is agglomerated into an extravagant pseudo-ruin. This composition of disorderly reproductions aesthetically integrates the stages of production and imitates the tufa stone, echoing the neo-classical façade. The luminous reflections of an absent stained-glass window painted on the surface and floor of this chaotic vestige suggest a beauty of the moment in the face of the incoherent strata of time. The title, Peaches and Cream, alludes on the one hand to the abundance of ornamentation and visual stimuli, and on the other to the English expression that describes an ideal situation where everything runs smoothly, while at the same time adopting an ironic stance with the rickety assemblage of architectural fragments that evokes a world in turmoil and peril. 

Michaela Sanson-Braun (b. 1975 in Germany) studied at the Stuttgart School of Fine Art (Germany) from 1994 to 1999 and at the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL) in London (UK) from 1999 to 2001, where she lived until 2019 before settling in Nantes, where she lives and works.

Michaela Sanson-Braun has recently exhibited her work in solo shows at CAC Le Carré in Château Gontier(Other People's Sunsets, 2024), at L'Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud(Le curieux rêve de Renée de Bourbon, Parcours d'Art dans l'Abbaye, 2023), at the Atelier Legault in Ombrée d'Anjou in collaboration with the Frac des Pays de la Loire and the Maine et Loire department (Il faut que tu revoies ta copie, 2022), and at the Bonus collective's Grand Huit in Nantes(55 Jours de confinement, 2020). Previously, in London, she has participated́ in numerous group shows such as at Dulwich Picture Gallery(Secret Charter, 2019), Whitechapel Project Space(Don't start with the good old things but the new bad ones, 2003), Jeffrey Charles Gallery(Chockerfuckingblocked, 2003), Flowers East Gallery(Small Is Beautiful - Voyage, 2002) as well as the art fair, London Zoo Art Fair (2004). 

In 2025, Michaela Sanson-Braun will be in residence at Blast collectif in Angers, while the Scroll Galerie in Nantes invites her for a solo show and the MASC - Musée d'art moderne et contemporain in Les Sables d'Olonne invites her to take part in its permanent exhibition.

A monographic catalog of the artist's work will be published by Empire in autumn 2025.

Michaela Sanson-Braun's pitch video

Michaela gives us the keys to understanding her Peaches and Cream forecourt installation.