Mauren Brodbeck is an artist, filmmaker, photographer, composer, designer, performer and a musician. The Swiss artist integrates in her photos graphic and formal interventions to erase certain details and keep only an essence of the being, the scenery, and the object. There is an approach here that takes as much after minimalism as it does from a taste for color, both strong and inadvertent. The artist created her palette in a laboratory by experimenting with chemical products. Furthermore, a type of architectonics is still present in the work. “On” the original photograph, the artist creates erasures, washes, collages, and overlays which give a particular emotion to the core of the image. A game of show/hide develops and creates an original universe, recalling certain pop-art (Warhol, Lichtenstein) just as much as it does kitsch (Gilbert & George) and fashion or design (Yvonne Kwok, Alexander McQueen).
The work is like its creator: sensitive and free. The images’ inherent exteriority bring back a form of intimacy. In residential or industrial neighborhoods, motels are the foundation of poetic and multi-sensorial “sonic landscapes.” The artist writes, “In my work, color is present. It tells all. Secrets. Wounds. Dreams. Mistakes. Loves. Life. You. Me. Us.” The search for identity and its representations are the major themes of a work with multiple crossings. The imaginary is based on the real, but it detaches from it and is reconstructed in forms and patterns that bead, peel themselves, and flutter in various types of progressions. False baroque, real postmodernist, the artist forces us to take a sharp look. Far from all mannerism, she makes room for an image where a space overruns with colors and forms with an abstractive purpose. From this place arises an obsessive fear, dismissed by the effect of transfers and reconstruction.
EXHIBITION
Mauren Brodbeck, Mood Motel
From March 17th to April 24th, 2016
Andata-Ritorno, laboratoire d’art contemporain
37, rue du Stand
1204 Geneva
Switzerland
http://www.andataritornolab.ch
BOOK
Mauren Brodbeck
Photographic works 2004-2014
Editions Drago, Roma
https://www.dragolab.com
http://www.maurenbrodbeck.com
