For its summer 2026 rooftop commission, Aspen Art Museum has invited Kerstin Brätsch to develop a site-specific presentation that places artworks in dialogue with elements of the natural world. The installation centers on a new series of four sculptural benches, generated through the artist’s long-standing engagement with traditional craft practices.

Brätsch often incorporates artisanal techniques—including stained glass, marbling, stucco marmo, and, more recently, mosaic—into her process, deploying these enduring traditions as extensions of her painting practice. Her ongoing series of mosaic benches builds upon the artist’s Fossil psychics (Stucco marmo) works, in which painterly gestures become bodies of fossilized fragments, as though they are remnants of geological phenomena or ancient creatures.

Kaleidoscopic and suffused with color, the benches are designed to be used by visitors and accommodate living plants within them, forming a vibrant landscape of native flowers and shrubs that will evolve with the changing seasons. In addition to the slopes of Aspen Mountain, they are framed against the backdrop of a new vinyl mural from Brätsch’s MƎTA series. The prismatic, textured expanse is developed from small oil paintings on paper that are scanned and enlarged, their surface marks and brushstrokes transformed into a sprawling digital configuration of painting’s foundational materials.

Expanded and repeated through symmetrical patterns, these images generate Rorschach-like forms that evoke a wide range of associations, from landscapes to ancient frescoes. In Brätsch’s work, the act of looking opens onto a perceptual field that invites viewers to interpret and project their own readings, rather than encounter any singular, fixed meaning.

(Visitors are welcome to sit on the benches. Please be cautious as they can become hot when exposed to sunlight for long periods)