Steffi (2025)

Babette Semmer 

Oil and Sand on Canvas,
51 x 41 cm

Babette Semmer (b.1989, London) is a painter based in Berlin.
In her current practice Semmer gleans certain motifs such as still lives, portraits and staged scenes from vintage magazines, and then crops, magnifies and distorts them through painterly processes. She combines the granular texture of coarse sand with the melting and luminous qualities of oil paint to create sensual effects that both echo analogue photography and undermine a purely representational reading of the work. This tactile approach to photo-realism allows the eye and the mind to oscillate between the concrete reality of the canvas as an object and its narrative and mimetic allusions.

Watch the film about the artist