At the Esther Woerdehoff Galery, the exhibition dedicated to Chema Madoz leaves room for the works of Iris Hutegger, Austrian artist. We glanced at some of her works at the booth of the gallery last November at Paris Photo. Here Esther Woerdehoff offers Hutegger her first personal exhibition in France.
“Above all, I am a sculptor” says Iris Hutegger. Although her work starts with a camera.
Originally from Austria, she became an artist in her thirties. From a certain distance, her artworks look like colored pencil drawings. But as you get closer, you can perceive the grain of the black and white photograph, and also hundreds of threads, overlapping on the image. We can now understand that the color comes from the threads which are embroidered on the image that add a third dimension to it. These embroidered photographs are unique pieces in different sizes and have no title other than numbers: the artist does not want the mountains to be identified geographically. The landscapes become the artist’s own creation, even if it starts with a photograph. Iris Hutegger, passionate hiker of the Alps, takes photographs of these rocky elements she knows since childhood using color films she then develops, often months later in order to distance herself from the memory of the place, in black and white which gives the mountains a pronounced grain and a lunar appearance. We shall know nothing of the places she photographed, only that they are landscapes, empty of any human or animal presence, and where vegetation merges with the rock, out of season. This technical choice brings the reality of a familiar landscape to abstraction, leaving only traces of shapes and textures.
Afterward, Iris Hutegger takes each photograph, printed on thick paper, and pass it under the foot of her Bernina sewing machine. In fact, she has been working with the producers of this Swiss model as sewing on paper calls for appropriate needles. The work process of Iris Hutegger is slow, meticulous and laborious. With the sewing machine, she brings to the landscape a unique color, a vegetation and geological dimension that never existed. In this dream vegetation, the threads intertwine in a net of colors and are so deeply set in the fibers of the print that in the most densely embroidered areas, the photographic paper disappears under the stitching of the needle. The artist insists on the time required for the completion of each piece, a slowness interrupted by pauses, after the hike and photographing, after the developing and printing, during the embroidering. These pauses allow her once again to break away from the memory of the place, hence its reality, in order to make something else, what she describes as a “real fictional image.” Influenced by the philosophy of Baudrillard, she wishes through her photographs to question the reality of the world beyond our perception and the technicality of the medium.
EXHIBITION
Iris Hutegger, windstill. grün.
From March 22nd to April 30th, 2016
Galerie Esther Woerdehoff
36 rue Falguière
75015 Paris
France
Tel : +33 09 51 51 24 50
Tue – Sat. 2pm – 6pm
http://www.ewgalerie.com
[email protected]
