Sabine Campana featured in three Thornwood summer art shows

German-born artist Sabine Campana will present her distinctive mixed-media wall reliefs in three consecutive shows at Thornwood Gallery in Santa Fe this summer.

The gallery’s first summer exhibition, “Portals and Pathways,” opened on Friday, June 13, and runs through the end of the month. Campana said the theme is well suited to her work, which has become increasingly focused on portals.

“I had this (motif) in my last show a lot,” Campana said, referring to her April solo exhibition, “Portals to the World,” at Thornwood’s Houston location. “It was about portals and gates from my travels, where I saw a lot of monumental gates, (including) massive doors to temples or churches or mosques.”

In that show, Campana exhibited her semi-abstract wall reliefs alongside reference images from around the world. But the relationship between her artistic interpretations and the real-world references is usually more oblique and poetic than literal.

“It’s really never my approach to create a copy,” she said.

For instance, a piece she made about the Alhambra palace in Grenada, Spain, used high-gloss resin to recreate “the intensity of the sun,” she said, and the feeling of “being surrounded by an ocean of gold.”

Among the new works Campana created for “Portals and Pathways” is “Portal to Sunken Cities,” a piece about the mysterious pre-Columbian archaeological sites known to lie buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico, but whose details have long eluded researchers.

Campana lives in Houston, 50 miles from the gulf, and used turquoise colors in that work as a double reference to the turquoise waters of the Gulf Coast and the importance of turquoise gemstones in Mesoamerican cultures. “It’s a portal to an ancient world,” she said, “a gateway to sunken cities.”

The gallery’s second show of the summer is a more expansive one. “Summer Group Show 2025,” which includes a larger selection of gallery artists, opens on July 11 and runs through the end of July. The third summer show, “High Desert Oasis,” opens on Aug. 8 and runs through the end of that month. Campana will present different pieces each month, and she plans to attend each opening.

“I have been with the gallery for 26 years,” she said. “They are out of Houston, and this is where I started with them … and now in Santa Fe. The gallery has a wonderful program.”

Campana grew up in East Berlin during the time of the Berlin Wall. She said she received “a great art education” in East Germany but had limited access to resources.

“Today I feel like that was an advantage,” she said. “You are forced to be creative, to create something from nothing.”

Campana continues to use nontraditional materials in her work, including scrap materials.

“I’m very resourceful,” she said. “I’m seeing things which I would not throw away. I see some potential in it, and I have — mostly right away — some idea of what I could do with it. And if not, I have a gigantic inventory of collected materials. It’s all labeled and boxed up, because there will be a day when I will use (each material) in some kind of art piece.”

Sabine Campana featured in three Thornwood summer art shows