Stone Monster

ROSANNA MCLAUGHLIN:
Let’s begin with the big question. Why stone?

KERSTIN BRÄTSCH:
Stone is something I could approach from so many perspectives. I consider stones as time collectors, and one of the core components of the universe. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been obsessed with them. When I was very young, I collected stones. I’d put them in my pockets and in my hands, and, when there was no more space, I would put them in my mouth and run around like a little stone monster. My artistic interest really started when I was working in a Swiss glass workshop in 2012, a place that seemed medieval and frozen in time.

The workshop had been working with Sigmar Polke on his last project, making stained glass windows from agate for the Grossmünster church in Zurich. At the time, I was making paintings on transparent material, using a technique where gradation is embedded in the brushstroke so that it looks like the “timelines” you see in stone. Urs Rickebach, the head of the glass workshop, said they reminded him of agate—the material Polke used for the church commission. He had all these leftovers from Polke’s project, and he offered them to me. It was incredible material to work with, even though it was literally just shards. Agate is formed over millions of years, and when I began incorporating it into my work, it appeared as if the inside of the Earth was looking back at me.

RM:   This interest in stone, and its relationship to painting, then migrated across mediums for you.

KB:   Yes, I moved from stained glass to marbling, another technique for imitating stone surfaces. In fact, it’s the complete opposite of stone: it takes thousands of drops of ink floating on a liquid surface to create the appearance of geological formations. From marbling, I shifted to stucco marmo, often used in churches as imitation stone, and then eventually to mosaic.

RM:   So many of the techniques you use have deep roots in spiritual practices. Stones were believed for a long time to have been created by the light of heaven – in the medieval era, those parts of the world with an abundance of precious stones were deemed be in closest proximity to the divine. Painted depictions of stone also play a fascinating role in religious art.

KB:   I found this so fascinating when I looked through Divine Presence – how on the reverse of some religious Renaissance paintings there are abstract paintings of stones, almost like a meditation instruction manual.

RM:   Yes! I found it mind-blowing how modern many of these depictions of stone looked – whether on the front or backs of paintings. Take an Annunciation scene by, say, Zanobi Strozzi or Fra Angelico. The majority of the composition – the figures, architecture, garden – is painted in the familiar hyper-realistic Renaissance style. Then you see how the stone floor is painted, and it’s psychedelic, gestural, wildly expressive, sometimes covered in what looks like spray-effect or spatter.

KB:   Like a miniature Jackson Pollock.

RM:   Exactly. It really shook up my sense of linear time to discover what looks like little pockets of modernism, hundreds of years too soon. These abstract depictions of stone can be understood as a means of conveying the divine in nonrepresentational form, something you could argue is always a feature of abstract painting—even if, during the modern period, the divine transformed into the subconscious. How do you relate to the spiritual dimension of painting? Does that interest you?

KB:   Very much so. When I was a student in the US, one of the first projects I made was the abstract power head/energy form paintings, which revolved around street psychics who promise to tell you your future. I’m also fascinated by the European lineage of figures such as Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, Ithell Colquhoun, and Georgiana Houghton, in whose work abstraction, spiritualism, and the occult intersect.

At the same time, German history shows how easily esoteric ideas can become entangled with political ideology, and how dangerous that can be. I think it’s important to approach these traditions with a certain distance, or even a sense of inversion.

A tarot card, for example, can simply be turned upside down, and, suddenly, its meaning changes completely. Maybe that’s one way of working with esoteric abstraction today: not by accepting symbolic systems as fixed truths, but by shifting, questioning, and rereading them so they remain open rather than ideological.

RM:   You can see this “twist” happening with the faces that emerge from the patterns in many of your works. On some level, they read as divine apparitions, like finding the face of God in a slab of marble. But they also look like emojis, and their silliness rubs up against the profundity.

KB:   I’m really interested in this liminality, this very thin line where there is the possibility for the work to collapse into kitsch. Maybe that’s also why I think so much about Alighiero Boetti’s idea of the shaman-showman—the figure who moves ambiguously between genuine spiritual charge and theatrical performance.

RM:   Earlier, you described stones as “time collectors.” There is a lot of temporal haunting happening in your work. Take the benches: they are haunted by mosaicists working on the floors of Pompeiian villas, and by the painters making  faux marble walls. And, despite being the product of meticulous labor and planning, the patterns on their surfaces feel gestural and intuitive—haunted by Abstract Expressionism. There’s a digital ghost in there too, as if the composition was the product of an AI hallucination.

KB:   The benches contain a strange kind of delay, where glitches and gaps emerge through the translation from one work into another. The mosaics relate back to my stucco marmo works, while the stucco marmo works trace further back to my earlier oil brushstroke paintings. In this way, the gesture of oil paint transforms into a sculptural brushstroke, and then again into an analog pixel—a stone mosaic. What appears as repetition is actually a continual shift in material language, where each translation produces its own loss, resistance, and new form of perception.

RM:   Is the idea to undermine the idea of linear time, to collapse time entirely?

KB:   It’s not so much about collapsing time, but about creating a condition in which multiple temporalities can exist within a single work. Lately, I’ve become increasingly interested in thinking about painting as a kind of metabolism. A metabolism is never fixed; it is constantly shifting, shaped by countless internal and external factors—how you slept, your nutritional intake, your hormones and stress levels, your emotional state, your environment. In the same way, a painting is never entirely stable. It changes each time it is encountered, depending on the viewer’s state of mind, the space they are in, the knowledge or expectations they bring to it, and their willingness to remain open to it.

RM:   Just like polished stone, which can appear in dazzling definition in sunlight, yet totally dull in dim conditions. The benches in Aspen are exposed to the elements, and as a garden of sorts, they are partly alive, so they are designed to embody transformation.

KB:   I guess I always look at things from the perspective of the painter, and I still think of the benches as transformable paintings. Mosaic can be read as an ancient medium whose history stretches from Roman floors and Byzantine walls to public spaces across centuries. Each small stone can be read as an analog pixel, a tactile unit of image making. The benches are paintings you can sit on, that plants grow out of, that face the sky, and slowly weather from climate and use.

__

Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer based in East Sussex, England.

Kerstin Brätsch: Fossil Psychic Stone Mimicry (Aspen) is on view at the Aspen Art Museum from May 20, 2026, to March 31, 2027.

← Art & Ideas