Stephanie Dost amasses a body of variously sized paintings, drawings, and photographs, both personal and found, into large, patch-worked grids. Though painting plays a role in her work, Dost is more of an installation artist painting with images rather than with paint itself. Consisting almost entirely of self-portraits and portraits of the artist’s friends, Dost’s grids elude a linear narrative and instead allow for a multifaceted portrait of the artist and her peers in the round. The artist’s universe of images, in a multitude of repeated and reworked versions, evokes an advertisement technique of endless plastering yet also remains connected to painterly technique in its composition and assemblage. The different layers of Dost’s installations, both technically and in content, combine for an overall effect evoking the vanities of the young.

Franziska Holstein similarly combines a multitude of disparate images into installations. Yet unlike Dost, Holstein employs solely painting on canvas to compose her assemblage works. A snapshot aesthetic pervades the work’s content with tightly cropped compositions, as Holstein’s images suggest personal, caught moments with an album-like presentation. Holstein’s portraits span from generations of fresh-faced children alone or with doting elders, to happy family pets, to everyday household items in all their domestic glory. Even empty interiors hint at a human presence soon to be returning. Similar to Dost’s installations where no singular narrative emerges, Holstein’s paintings, with a seemingly female viewpoint, produce a collective feeling of nostalgia for the intimate scenes they portray.