Katrin Schnabl’s work engages with dualities. The areas found between viewer and wearer, inner and outer, latent and manifest energy, and grief and joy fascinate the artist.

In 2019 she began work on addressing and expressing these spaces in between through Portal, a series of dimensional metal frames draped in bold, transparent fabric.

Confronted with physical pain from breaking her leg and the emotional distress of losing a loved one, Schnabl’s creative approach changed with Portal. “I observed more, was more still and started to chart a different direction for myself,” the artist says. Inspired by her father’s old geometry notebooks showing an array of neatly drawn curves and practices of Buddhist philosophy, the works in Portal took shape.

Portal is a series of rectangular metal frames, resembling doorframes and scrolls swathed in a surface of sheer solid-colored fabrics, curvilinearly stitched together, forming a dimensional unit. The pieces are large, ranging in height from about four to 10 feet. The fabrics are mesh polyamides and leftover pieces accumulated from Schnabl’s career as a fashion designer, and the colors range from vibrant blues and electric greens to deep browns and reds.

“If I was a painter, this is how I would paint,” Schnabl explains. The dimensionality of the works gives them a body, allowing her method of painting to extend beyond the canvas, making the pieces something in between a painting and an installation. The desire to give the works depth comes perhaps from her years of pattern-cutting and design expertise and working with the human form. “I am dressing my feelings in a way,” she says. By imbuing the works with the body of a dimensional frame, Portal offers the viewer several surfaces to contemplate and encourages a dynamic relationship as one ambles around the works.

In 2020, Schnabl participated in the call for ART-IN-PLACE, a collaboration between CNL Projects and Terrain Exhibitions, which asked artists to exhibit an artwork outside their home or from a window visible to the public, providing a sense of connectivity during a time of isolation. She exhibited Portal 1.2 and Portal 2.3 as scrolls from her windows. Perhaps more than the other works in the series, the scrolls demand the viewer’s focus, for the smallest movement of the scroll creates a unique set of patterns, colors, surfaces, and observations.

Through Portal, Schnabl takes hold of the line and gives it agency and depth, both creating and releasing tension. The lines made by the stitched seams in Portal continue unto themselves, dip into and activate new shapes, recede and reappear, move with the light, depend on the viewer’s movement as much as they are liberated from all constraints. Schnabl continues to seek out new ways of expanding and exhibiting the works. —Ana Sekler