A paper duvet / faces of bread / a knight on a branch / porcelain snowballs / a fan of stitched leaves / Africa in ice / a dangerous animal in a courtyard / clay loaves of bread / braille on a bar of soap / a polar bear suit in South Africa …

Sabine Käppler is a professional transposer: she transposes. Due to her doing, things continue to end up elsewhere, leaving their own biotopes.

This may entail that something is made of an entirely different material than usual. The molded face, for instance—not made of clay, but of bread—is maneuvered from the domain of sculpture into the kitchen; snowballs that, due to their porcelain constitution, move from the scene of wintry fun into the china cabinet; or a fan that appears to have been stitched together from the leaves it is actually meant to blow away.

Some of these transpositions are quite literal, however. The entire African continent has, on a map of the world, borrowed all of Greenland’s ice. An imaginary animal, sitting in a cage in the courtyard of a gallery, has left its—in itself weirdly spread out—territory. A polar bear emerges hitchhiking in South Africa.

By dragging everything off, and by changing the constitution of things, Käppler allows us newly to experience the things she takes in hand.

"The best one can do, is therefore to look at things anew, to go for a walk, or to stretch oneself out in the grass or under the trees, and start all over again…," Francis Ponge once said. This became Sabine Käppler’s motto, and it even seems to work, as it turns out.

Sabine Käppler lives with her husband and their three children on a small green patch of land near Berkel en Rodenrijs in Randstad, next to a nature reserve for birds but encroached by ever-expanding business parks. In the past two years Käppler (1966) has been creating new work in an added studiobuilding in the yard, after a long period in which she didn’t manifest her artistic talent in making art for galleries, museums and other presentation environments. ‘Because of my family, I lacked the time and concentration for working in the studio. In a visual sense, I was primarily focused on designing our lives in this extraordinary area.’

For Sabine Käppler, such an isolated living environment is familiar territory. While she grew up in Stuttgart, she often went to the Swabian Alps, the German Central Uplands, where her grandfather had a simple cabin that he used as a basis for his hikes through the area. She spent a lot of time there, and felt a deep connection with the simple natural life in the forests.

Her mother had been a goldsmith- and jewellery design-student at the Fachhochschule für Gestaltung in Schwäbisch Gmünd, but a progressive, incurable illness forced her to stop working. She died when her daughter was nineteen and followed in her footsteps by studying jewellery design at the same school.

‘For designers, it was a very good school as far as innovation and conceptual starting points were concerned. But the department where I was studying was mostly focused on the development of the craft through form and technique. I had different ideas immediately and was more interested in sculptural thinking than in making jewellery. I did get the opportunity to develop this interest, though. When, for instance, we had to design a hat, I made a wind-hat, a rain-hat and a cloud-hat. They weren’t exactly functional but rather acted as metaphorical images. During a study-trip we visited the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, which I had already heard about. At the Rietveld the design of jewellery, glass and ceramics is approached from a fine arts perspective, very different from what I was accustomed to in Germany. I graduated in 1992, and one year later I went to the Rietveld Academy. After my bachelor’s I did my master’s degree in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute. I have been professionally active since 1998, and for a couple of years I fully participated in the art scene.’

She considers the Basicyear at the Rietveld Academy as a cathartic year for her artistic development. ‘I had to unlearn everything I had to learn before. I realised that the design principles that I had mastered could be approached more freely. I could remain faithful to the materials with transformative characteristics that had always fascinated me, such as beeswax. At the Rietveld I made hot water bags that look quite sturdy because of their materiality, but they deny their function as soon as they are filled with hot water; the wax just melts.’

With her sculptural work, Sabine Käppler creates connections between organic materials, physical conditions and mental processes. These threefold connections give it, despite its form and tactility, a certain elusiveness. Her work is created through a manual and labour-intensive process where the mind gets into a flow due to the absorption in carefully executed actions.

She creates her objects in the peace and quiet of her home environment, which is like the eye of the storm amidst the urban infrastructure. Her studio and house are situated behind a classic Dutch windmill which, dwarfed by the huge business-buildings that devour the old landscape, has become a cherished fremdkörper in its new surroundings.

To feed her art, Sabine Käppler collects objects and pictures that she wants to remember and that give her a sense of wonder. Out of this considerable hoard she makes strict selections to work with. She alienates them from their origins by giving them other functions that re-enforce their inner healing powers, which can be used to ward off the inevitable fate of the transience of life – if one considers that exclusively in terms of life and death.

In Käppler’s work, something which has never ended is beginning. Applying this to her career, one could say that she, during the decade when she withdrew from the professional scene, really took the time to be an artist. ‘Life as such is my artistry. My work was appreciated on a limited scale for a while, but that didn’t make it any less important for me. I create for people. While working I must pay attention, be patient and deal with the randomness of life. You might compare it to Japanese laquerware, applying layers of laquer on wood. My entire work is meant as some sort of protection of the vulnerability that I expose.’

Sabine Käppler has made a number of collages with composed cut-outs from pictures of bees in hallucinating, geometrical figures, or in disintegrating swarms. Bees guide each other to food sources by elaborate dancing, but under Käppler’s direction the choreography of their dance is somewhat compromised. Where one collage shows the elaborate pattern of the heart of a sunflower, another one has the bees going nuts. It is her way of addressing the connection between order and chaos, finding a balance between movement, counter-movement and stability. In her work, something is solved in itself. Getting a visual grip on the unexplainable is what motivates her to use natural materials – they give her something to hold on to.

The contrasts in Käppler’s work are not dualistic; they contradict each other in multiple ways, thus reinforcing each other. Her fascination with cacti – they are treated similarly to the bees and are glued in endless numbers on formless shapes – culminates in objects that are seductive and both painful and healing. These works are formless precisely because they are all about playfulness, fun and colour.

Cardboard packaging grids that look like bee combs are filled up with fluid wax crayon to create a varied colourful base, or blocks of oil pastel are used to build stringent patterns that seemingly aim for free forms. Sabine Käppler: ‘I want to do more with those colours. My grandfather was a trader in lubricating oil. His workshop was filled with oil mixtures in strong blue and green tints. The memory of them plays a part in my colour research: how do they affect us, how do they develop? The studio is like the laboratory of an alchemist who wants to create something valuable out of something which has hardly any value. Years ago, after a visit to Asia where I saw Buddha statues everywhere, I made lots of Buddha figurines, glazed in gold, until I was totally fed up with them. I joined them all together into one lumped shape; transformed buddhas.’ A similar transformed spirituality can be found in her porcelain snowballs for which she hardened and weighted the melting process, her bread sculptures with human faces, or her white soap bars with writing in braille that wash away the sense of touch.

Sabine Käppler is an artist at all times. Each moment counts. Paraphrasing the notorious quote by Joseph Beuys (ich kenne kein Weekend), she says: ‘It’s always weekend for me; everything must be in order to get cracking.’

Alex de Vries

I was envious when I saw her cactus collages (Studies 2019). Cactuses clumped together into an oval. Huddled like frightened animals. Prickly and enchanting at the same time.

I would have loved conceiving this three-dimensional collages. Yet, thinking back, I had already been envious of her earlier bread portraits. Sooner or later, we will all end up as a dough mask. Until then, dear reader or viewer, you too may feel a touch of envy at the sight of one or more of Sabine’s transpositions. Start with one of the golden stones ('Transformed Buddhas'). They breathe greatness and immeasurable wealth and yet lack the dead weight of possession. Pick it up and feel. Don’t try to grasp it. Sabine’s art is not there to be grasped. It is there to elicit different perspectives. Her Loops are also enviable. Little coagulated journeys, or are they mental leaps ? Art is always in the eye of the beholder. You get to determine the meaning and it may change before your eyes.

Sabine is currently focussing on bees, a long lasting love affair. She fills cardboard honeycomb with coloured wax crayons. Objects with the feel of wax. To be appreciated freestanding or hung on the wall. Sabine: "The smell of beeswax, propolis and honey is simply unbelievable. Maybe I am just trying to find a shape to express it." Search is innate to artists. Once seen, Sabine Käppler’s transpositions remain etched in your mind. They are pared back to the elemental, as if Sabine sees through things and translates the unfathomable. You cannot reach any higher.