Audrey Guttman

Audrey Guttman
Brussels, Belgium

STATEMENT

My research-based practice examines our relationship to images, both material and mental, and the ways they shape our lives. Working across the fields of collage, poetry, books and performance, I search for short-circuits in meaning, space and time, that mirror my own dissonant experience of being alive.

I like to question our inherited ways of seeing and interpreting. I like the familiar to become unfamiliar and the strange to become intimate. Collage creates a supernatural loophole which, for me, resembles a kind of safe space. In this other dimension, transformation and perpetual change abound. Piles of magazines become trays of images become heaps of myself become new lines of thought, new echoes and meanings. Even the tiniest variations in this alchemical process can lead to entirely new perspectives on what images are, and can do.

Mining the detritus of our visual culture, permeated by commerce, I comb through the relics of our compulsive need to self-represent, until I find a sense of poetry and integrity. I deconstruct and reassemble found fragments in order to disrupt established connotations and reveal unexpected parallels. Embedding private references to art history and literature, I subvert the commercial messaging to feed my own quest for meaning as I navigate the ethics of a world addicted to newness, primarily concerned with using art to translate the unspeakable.

BIO

Audrey Guttman (b. 1987, Brussels) is a Belgian multidisciplinary artist whose research-based practice examines our relationship with images, both material and imaginary. Working across collage, mixed media, and poetry, she deconstructs and reassembles found fragments in order to disrupt established connotations and reveal unexpected parallels. Echoing the permanent reshuffling of our consciousness, her work cracks meaning open and renders contemporary dissonance with a sense of profound sensibility.

Guttman has presented solo exhibitions at Hangar Photo Art Center (Brussels), Galerie Emilie Dujat and Galerie Art Sablon (Brussels), and will be exhibited at Spazio Nobile’s Studiolo (Brussels), Il Salviatino (Florence) and Futura Gallery (Pietrasanta) in 2021. She has also been included in group exhibitions at AVEE, Verbeke Foundation in Belgium, Museo dei Bozzetti, Rochester, New York, and Ground Control in Paris.

In 2020, she published an artist book entitled Making Arrangements. She was subsequently awarded the first-ever artist residency at Hangar Photo Art Center in Brussels. She has contributed collages to publications such as PEN Magazine, Mon Oeil, Filiber, Defaced and Rosie, amongst others, and created commissions for a wide range of clients including orchestras, festivals and literary prizes.

Guttman holds a masters of research degree in art history, art theory and literature from Paris’s Ecole des Hautes Études, a masters degree from Ecole de la Communication at Sciences Po Paris and an undergraduate degree in political science from Sciences Po Paris. She is based between Paris and Brussels.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
www.audreyguttman.com

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