27 June-25 July 2014
Opening Reception: Thursday, 26 June, 6-9PM
“Time Is On My Side”: Sylvie Zürcher
In “Time Is On My Side”, Silvie Zürcher presents a series of new works in which she uses plant materials, among other things, which she finds in nature. She combines shrubs, branches and flowers to create still lifes. Rocks and grass are used as disguising accessories in her self-portraits, and she works dried leaves and flowers into collages. For her works, Zürcher uses found photographs from magazines, which she retouches by hand, or she digitally scans and photographs her own three-dimensional creations and their surfaces, and then edits the pictures on a computer. In the medium of photography, nature is often used to represent a faithful depiction of “reality”. In Zürcher’s universe of images, however, nature, or the idea of nature, serves as a raw material that she modifies in such a way that the boundaries between analogue and digital are deliberately blurred and, despite the richness of detail, it is no longer apparent what is a likeness and what is a digital construct.
To keep wildly proliferating, constantly growing and expanding nature at bay, to tame and arrange it according to our culturally determined ideas, it must be constantly and radically pruned. Silvie Zürcher uses the resulting “surplus material” for her photographed scenes. She breathes new life into the bushes, grass and flowers before their inevitable decay. She creates cheerfully colourful assemblages that always also allude to the moment of irrevocable decomposition. The result is a precarious beauty that breaches the continuity of time by immobilizing the objects through photography.
In an untitled series of collages (2014), Zürcher modifies found fashion photographs from magazines.The leitmotif of these pictures–the perfectly draped, expensively dressed human body in the middle of the picture–is painted over, retouched or covered with plants to such a degree that it completely dissolves in the background. She thus transforms the originally secondary element of the scenery into a landscape in its own right that is characterized by the absence of the bodies, which are still present but no longer visible. In her self-portraits, the artist also uses plant materials to disguise herself and hide her identity. In this way, the works question the human body, which is both part of nature and a place in which each period’s cultural ideas of naturalness and beauty are explored.
(adapted from gallery materials written by Siri Peyer)
INFORMATION
Hauser Gallery
Pflanzschulstrasse 17
8004 Zurich, Switzerland
(41) 43 243 86 06
Hours:
Wednesday-Friday, 2-6PM or by appointment
Image:
untitled
by Sylvie Zürcher
paper and plant materials
2014
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Hauser, Zurich