About me

Woodcuts are one of the oldest media of printing reproduction in art history.
Gabi Dahl reinterprets this technique. However, she is more interested in the artistic possibilities of expression than in the multiple printing of a single template.
Her works are always created using several plates, which she prints on top of each other manually, without a press. This allows her to maintain manual control over the intensity and expressiveness of the color.
Her sheets appear as filigree line structures placed above or next to translucent areas of color. Moving lines dissolve from dark to light. They fray and disappear on the picture surface. Others become flat structures that contrast with the line structures. The interplay of the image forms creates an indeterminate pictorial space that overlaps in many ways. Some of the sheets suggest pictorial depth or almost plastic structures. But the pictorial space can never be precisely located. Individual image elements seem to jump back and forth again and again. Different image planes connect. This keeps her works in constant motion. These moving structures are supported by subtle color contrasts.
Gabi Dahl’s works often seem like fleeting movements. Spontaneous and gestural. However, they find great compositional certainty through the technique of woodcut, in which everything superfluous must be cut away from the wood.

Excerpt from speech by Dr. Falko Herlemann, art historian