Events/Openings

We are glad to present Marie Rief's latest works in her second solo-exhibition. After her drawings, it is now one photograph that she has manipulated to create her stunning photograms.

The sandy barren scenery, the distant and sharp horizon and the gloomy lighting evoke pictures of deserts and steppes, an open space where the upper and the lower are apparently mightily opposed. The association with film sceneries, archetypal landscapes in painting and photography arise immediately.

The same space in which the thoughts run free will be anew treated for each work: the light is adjusted, new elements intersect the space or let it disappear and replace it by broken planes. The straight horizon cannot hide the restricted view. The surface of the desert-like width shows clearly how it was produced, how it differs from the original landscape through enlargement and cropping. Even though the macrocosm leads to concentrate on details, the look is driven to search for the wide edge of the horizon line, discovering indications of overlapping and coloration, some hardness and fragility.

In some works the landscape remains, in others it withdraws again, until there is literally nothing left from the togetherness of earth and sky. The landscape is an artistic composition, not only revealed by the traces of re-assembling, by their structure made of breaks, by a color patch splitting it horizontally: the landscape itself is broken, then again jointed. It forms a tile-like structure that results from a sensitive and pragmatic approach in dealing with the photographic materials.

The landscape is once again worked on, still by hand: a section is chosen, it is cropped, enlarged, colorized, composed. Once again, the landscape is submitted to the work, it is created to fulfill a purpose just like all cultural landscapes. The landscape becomes the place of our expectations, a field to clear and cultivate, in which we sow our troubles, experiences and thoughts to transcend our emotional harassment.

The vanishing place, though its alienation, is supposed to take over the position for what is difficult to describe as clear or obscure, and which raises the well-known feeling of distantness and weakness that has always led people to attribute qualities and symbolic charge to the landscape.