In her works, Rahel Pötsch combines painting with paper cuts, performance and video to create opulent works of art overflowing with shapes and colours. They often look like spatial stagings whose formal vocabulary is mostly borrowed from floral models.

Rahel Pötsch has developed the exhibition ‘orange watch’ for the artothek, in which she shows groups of paintings on paper. While painting and its expansion into painting actions have so far culminated in stop-motion video works, in Cologne she is reducing her range of action to the classic ‘panel painting’. In this, she remains true to her typical working material: acrylic paints, markers and spray colours on robust kraft paper form the basis for the play with illusionary space and two-dimensional painting, with figuration and abstraction. Layer by layer, the artist develops illusionistic spaces in bright colours in her paintings and breaks up their effect by overpainting them with flat, pattern-like forms. Previous stages of the painting still appear in some places or are hidden behind transparent areas of colour. The painting process is not visualised as an act, but can still be traced within the picture. Here, the viewer is no longer dictated the speed and rhythm in which the images must be read by the timing of the video editing, but instead overpainted fragments and a ‘rhythmic hanging’ are reminiscent of time-based work.

The reference to time has been incorporated into the exhibition title as an overarching theme. ‘orange watch’ is cited in individual pictures through clock motifs and naturally refers to the importance of the passing of time and personal time management in today's time-optimised society. On the other hand, the ambiguity of the English word ‘watch’ invites the public to perceive the exhibited works with a great deal of time and concentration. An experiment in which the artist takes her audience back to the origins of viewing images.