Elina Brotherus
It’s Not Me, It’s a Photograph
Opening: Tue, 13.03.2018, 19:00
‘In my understanding of Elina Brotherus’s twenty years of artistic output, neither the autobiographical nor the anecdotal takes centre stage. For the viewer, her photographs are pure projection surfaces that are provided without back stories, descriptive titles or additional information. They enable processes of identification, of introspection and projection, voyeurism and fetishism. There is a multitude of possibilities for associating the viewer and her photographs,’ writes American art historian and author Abigail Solomon-Godeau in Elina Brotherus’s latest catalogue published to coincide with her Règle du jeu exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2017.
The Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus deals with her own biography, the landscape genre, and art history in her photographs and films. She explores the possibilities of photographic self-dramatization while frequently referring to icons of nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting or, as she does in her recent works, to contemporary art from the 1960s and 1970s. Great sensitivity, formal mastery, and accomplished perfectionism characterize her visual language. She works in series, avoiding large-format single shots.
This marks the first time the coherent and varied oeuvre of the artist, who was born in 1972 and already counts among her generation’s most renowned European representatives, is shown in a comprehensive exhibition in Austria. Along with a selection of Brotherus’s recent works, the exhibition features a work group commissioned by the Kunsthaus Wien and created by Brotherus in January 2018 in Vienna. In it, Brotherus deals with the works of VALIE EXPORT, Erwin Wurm, and other Austrian artists, using them as references for new photographic and filmic works.
‘I’m an artist, so, unlike “proper adults”, that allows me to do crazy things. The older I am, the more playful I become. The things I’m most interested in at the moment occur with a certain levity and with humour, even though there is also a serious side to my work. Fundamentally, to play such a game, you first need to define the crazy rules yourself and then simply let yourself go along with it.’ Elina Brotherus, 2016
The Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus deals with her own biography, the landscape genre, and art history in her photographs and films. She explores the possibilities of photographic self-dramatization while frequently referring to icons of nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting or, as she does in her recent works, to contemporary art from the 1960s and 1970s. Great sensitivity, formal mastery, and accomplished perfectionism characterize her visual language. She works in series, avoiding large-format single shots.
This marks the first time the coherent and varied oeuvre of the artist, who was born in 1972 and already counts among her generation’s most renowned European representatives, is shown in a comprehensive exhibition in Austria. Along with a selection of Brotherus’s recent works, the exhibition features a work group commissioned by the Kunsthaus Wien and created by Brotherus in January 2018 in Vienna. In it, Brotherus deals with the works of VALIE EXPORT, Erwin Wurm, and other Austrian artists, using them as references for new photographic and filmic works.
‘I’m an artist, so, unlike “proper adults”, that allows me to do crazy things. The older I am, the more playful I become. The things I’m most interested in at the moment occur with a certain levity and with humour, even though there is also a serious side to my work. Fundamentally, to play such a game, you first need to define the crazy rules yourself and then simply let yourself go along with it.’ Elina Brotherus, 2016
Curators: Verena Kaspar-Eisert, Bettina Leidl
www.elinabrotherus.com